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Kevin Snow McCurley | |
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| Alma mater | University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign |
| Years active | 1981-present? |
| Known for | Studying number theory and cryptography, working at Google |
Kevin Snow McCurley [1] is a mathematician, computer scientist, and cryptographer, and a former [2] [ unreliable source? ] research scientist at Google. He has written publications about information retrieval, algorithms, parallel computing, cryptography, and number theory. [3]
When he was a child, McCurley had built model planes and cars, and he enjoyed making things with his hands. [3]
McCurley attended a high school in San Jose, California. There, one of his teachers, Judy Jones, showed him that "mathematics really could be fun and interesting" and encouraged him to attend mathematical contests. [3]
In his first year at Santa Clara University, McCurley had Jerry Anderson, a former president of the MAA, as his professor in calculus; Anderson told "interesting stories" and was able to "relate the mathematics to history and to activities that were meaningful". [3] His early research was in number theory, investigating such topics as primes in arithmetic progression and polynomials with many initial composite values. Then he retrained himself in computer science.[ citation needed ]
In 1981, McCurley received his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. [1] His dissertation in analytic number theory was titled Explicit Estimates for Functions of Primes in Arithmetic Progressions, and his advisor was Paul Trevier Bateman. [3] [1] He also received a master's in statistics there. [3]
In the fall of 1995, McCurley taught an undergraduate course on cryptology at the University of New Mexico. [4] [5] [ non-primary source needed ]
After he was a post-doc at Michigan State University, McCurley took a job at USC (Los Angeles), where he published some papers with Leonard Adleman about algorithms and complexity. [3]
Before 2005[ when? ], McCurley worked at IBM Almaden Research Center, Sandia National Laboratories, and at the University of Southern California. [3] McCurley worked in a cryptography group at Sandia National Laboratories, where he worked on applying number theory to cryptography and parallel computing. [3] He then worked at IBM Research in California on digital rights management, where he wrote a few patents; [3] he was still working there in January 1999. [6]
A former president of the International Association for Cryptologic Research, McCurley was selected as an IACR Fellow in 2005. [7]
From 2005 to at least 2009[ when? ] McCurley was a research scientist at Google Research. [3] There, things he worked on included search, advertisements, and Android. [3]
In 2000, McCurley suggested that, as a countermeasure against email spam, recipients of unknown senders should request that the message include a first name or a few dollars as compensation. He also suggested that this be formalized in an open standard. [8]
McCurley has made three bets with Ron Fagin about the outcome of the P versus NP problem. In each bet, the outcome P = NP would require Fagin to pay McCurley $50, whereas P != NP would require McCurley to pay Fagin $10; however, the first bet has a deadline of 31 December 2010, the second a deadline of 31 December 2020, and the third (made in 2021) a deadline of 31 December 2030. [9] [ unreliable source? ]
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