The Father of DNA Computing

One of my friends have a small display system with him to login to his bank account.It displays the security code needed to login his bank account for transactions. Similar systems are used to login secured servers. Did you know the algoritham used for this secure login.This time i like to tell about Leonard Adleman in the trio(Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman) behind RSA Cryptosystem userd for secure login.


Leonard Adleman –
The Father of DNA Computing


Leonard Adleman (born December 31, 1945) is a theoretical computer scientist and professor of computer science and molecular biology at the University of Southern California. He is known for being the inventor of the RSA (Rivest-Shamir-Adleman) cryptosystem in 1977, and of DNA computing. RSA is in
widespread use in security applications, including digital signatures.

Leonard Adleman was interested in math and science ever since he was a child.In 1968, he completed his undergraduate degree at the University of California at Berkeley in mathematics. He entered graduate school at the San Francisco State College only to drop out when he found work as a computer programmer for the Federal Reserve Bank in San Francisco. He returned to Berkeley later and completed a Ph.D in computer science in 1976. He then took an assistant professorship at MIT where he met two other young researchers, Ron Rivest and Adi Shamir. Rivest and Shamir interested Adleman in the work they were doing: building a public key cryptography system. The threeeventually pioneered the one-way function that is now used in public key crypto systems with Rivest and Shamir thinking up possible one-way functions
while Adleman attempted to break them. All together, 42 different functions were tried until they found one that Adleman could not break. This became the basis for the widely used cryptography system which came to bear the initials of the trio: RSA (Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman).


For his contribution to the invention of the RSA cryptosystem, Adleman was a recipient along with Ron Rivest and Adi Shamir of the 2002 ACM Turing Award, often called the Nobel Prize of Computer ScienceAfter the instant fame and recognition for his groundbreaking work, Adleman
became a professor of computer science at USC. At USC, he and student name Fred Cohen, tested the first computer “virus” in 1983.

In 1994, his paper Molecular Computation of Solutions To Combinatorial Problems described the experimental use of DNA as a computational system. In it, he solved a seven-node instance of the Hamiltonian Graph problem, an NP-Complete problem similar to the traveling salesman problem. While the solution to a seven-node instance is trivial, this paper is the first known
instance of the successful use of DNA to compute an algorithm. DNA computing has been shown to have potential as a means to solve several other large-scale combinatorial search problems.
Go on DNA computing, go on...

References: wikipedia, other websites.
friends, thanks for your comments...
Would like to know whether you liked this post or not.
do comments or mail me: "tojeevan@gmail.com"