Jeffrey Shallit

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Jeffrey Outlaw Shallit (born October 17, 1957 in Philadelphia ) is an American mathematician and computer scientist .

Shallit studied at Princeton University (Bachelor cum laude 1979) and received his doctorate in 1983 from the University of California, Berkeley with Manuel Blum ( Metric Theory of Pierce Extensions ). From 1983 he was an assistant professor at the University of Chicago and from 1988 to 1990 at Dartmouth College . In 1990 he became Associate Professor and 2000 Professor in the Faculty of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo, Canada .

In addition to algorithmic number theory (e.g. primality tests), he deals with formal languages, automaton theory, algorithm theory, combinatorics of word problems and computer graphics . He has the Erdős number 1 because he published Erdős with Paul in 1991 . With Eric Bach he wrote a standard work on algorithmic number theory.

In 2003 he investigated the problem of efficient change systems and pleaded (not taken very seriously) in this context for the introduction of an 18-cent coin in the USA (more precisely 1, 5, 15, 18, 25 cents). According to Shallit, a (1, 3, 4, 10, 30, 40, 100, 300, 400) system in Europe would be cheaper than the (1, 2, 5, 10, 20, 50, 100, 200, 500) -System.

He wrote an essay with Hugh C. Williams and François Morain on an early mechanical prime factorization machine (by the Carissan brothers in 1919).

He is the editor of Integer Sequences magazine . In 2008 he became a Distinguished Member of the ACM . Since 1996 he has been Vice President of the Canadian Electronic Frontier Foundation (Electronic Frontier Canada).

Shallit, who himself has Jewish ancestors in Russia, also emerged as a critic of Holocaust deniers in an Internet report in 1997 . He criticized the intelligent design protagonist William A. Dembski , for whom he also demonstrated scientific errors in the introduction of a new concept of complexity.

Fonts

  • With Eric Bach: Algorithmic Number Theory . Vol. 1 (Efficient Algorithms), MIT Press 1996
  • With Jean-Paul Allouche : Automatic Sequences - Theory, Applications, Generalizations . Cambridge University Press 2003
  • A second course in Formal Languages ​​and Automata Theory . Cambridge University Press 2008

Web links

Footnotes

  1. ^ Paul Erdős, Jeffrey Shallit: New Bounds on the Length of Finite Pierce and Engel Series. Sem. Theor. Nombres Bordeaux 3, 43-53, 1991
  2. ↑ Jeffrey Shallit: What this country needs is an 18 cent piece . Mathematical Intelligencer 2003, No. 2. The median number of coins exchanged (if every exchange is equally likely) is 3.89 with the 18 cent system compared to 4.7 in the current system. Instead of 25, 29 cents can be used with the same average optimal number of exchanged coins. The mental arithmetic when exchanging is of course made difficult with 18 cents coins.
  3. ↑ To the Carissan machine
  4. ↑ Electronic Frontier Canada
  5. ^ Shallit Holocaust Revisited - Lies of our Times
  6. ↑ Wesley Elsberry, Jeffrey Shallit: Information theory, evolutionary computation and Dembski´s "Complex Specified Information"
personal data
SURNAME Shallit, Jeffrey
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Shallit, Jeffrey Outlaw (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American mathematician and computer scientist
DATE OF BIRTH 17th October 1957
PLACE OF BIRTH Philadelphia