Susan Landau (computer scientist)

Susan Eva Landau (born June 3, 1954 in New York ) is an American computer scientist and is known as an expert on data security issues.

Life

Landau studied at Princeton University (Bachelor 1976), Cornell University (Masters 1979) and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , where she received her PhD in 1983. She was at the University of Massachusetts , Wesleyan University and visiting scholar at Cornell University (where she and Dexter Kozen found a polynomial-time algorithm for the composition decomposition of polynomials in 1989 ), Yale University and at MSRI .

She then worked as an engineer at Sun Microsystems Laboratories (most recently as a Distinguished Engineer ), where she was particularly concerned with security issues such as digital rights management or public surveillance. In the 1990s she was also involved in the public discussion about the question of exporting cryptographic software in the USA. Since then, she has been a sought-after expert in the US public on security issues relating to the Internet and data security issues in general, and has also advised national authorities in Europe. She has written for Scientific American , the Washington Post, and the Boston Globe , among others .

For many years she also taught mathematics to high school students who were gifted in mathematics in summer camps at Hampshire College Summer Studies in Mathematics .

Landau is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and is a Distinguished Engineer of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). She serves on the ACM Computer Security Advisory Boards and served six years on those of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). She is the lead author of the ACM Reports Codes, Keys and Conflicts: Issues in US Crypto Policy, 1994.

She is committed to women in computer science, for example on the ResearcHers Email List she founded, on the ACM committees (where she initiated the Athena Lecture as an honor for computer scientists) and she is a member of the Computing Research Association Committee on the Status of Woman in Computing Research (CRAW)

She dealt with algorithm theory and symbolic computing. In 1989 she developed the first algorithm to decide whether an expression of nested roots can be simplified and found polynomial-time algorithms for various problems for which only one exponential-time algorithm was previously known.

She is co-editor of the Notices of the American Mathematical Society.

She is married and has two kids.

Fonts

• With Whitfield Diffie Privacy on the Line - the Politics of wiretapping and encryption , MIT Press 1998, 2007
• Standing the test of time- the DES , Notices AMS 2000, issue 3
• Find me a Hash , Notices AMS 2006, issue 3
• Communication security in the 21st Century- the AES , Notices AMS 2000, issue 4

Web links

• Site at Oracle (English)
• Interview from her time as a high school teacher about children and career (English)
• Interview; There she claims to have completed her doctorate at the age of 28 , the doctorate took place according to her website in 1983 (English)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Contemporary authors: a bio-bibliographical guide to current writers in fiction, general nonfiction, poetry, journalism, drama, motion pictures, television and other fields , Gale Research Co., 1998, p. 195 .
2. ↑ Landau Internet Eavesdropping , Scientific American September 2008
3. ↑ ResearcHers project at the Anita Borg Institute for Woman in Technology ( Memento of the original from July 16, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
4. ↑ CRAW website
5. ↑ Landau Simplification of nested radicals , SIAM Journal on Computing, Volume 21, 1992, pp. 85-110