Carl Pomerance

Carl Bernard Pomerance (born in 1944 in Joplin, Missouri) is an American number theorist. He attended college at Brown University and later received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1972 with a dissertation proving that any odd perfect number has at least 7 distinct prime factors. He immediately joined the faculty at the University of Georgia, becoming full professor in 1982. He subsequently worked at Lucent Technologies for a number of years, and then became a distinguished Professor at Dartmouth College.

He has over 120 publications, including co-authorship with Richard Crandall of Prime numbers: a computational perspective, Springer-Verlag, 2001, 2005 and co-editing with Michael Th. Rassias of Analytic Number Theory, Springer, 2015. He is the inventor of one of the integer factorization methods, the quadratic sieve algorithm, which was used in 1994 for the factorization of RSA-129. He is also one of the discoverers of the Adleman–Pomerance–Rumely primality test.

He has won many teaching and research awards, including the Chauvenet Prize in 1985, MAA's distinguished university teaching award in 1997, and the Levi L. Conant Prize in 2001.