Peter Shor

This article is about a computer scientist. For the British politician, see Peter Shore.

Peter W. Shor (born August 14, 1959) is an American theoretical computer scientist most famous for his work on quantum computation, in particular for devising a quantum algorithm for factoring exponentially faster than the best currently-known algorithm running on a classical computer (see Shor's algorithm). He was working then at AT&T Bell Laboratories in 1994. He was the recipient of the Nevanlinna Prize in 1998, a MacArthur Fellowship in 1999, and a Gödel prize in 1999 among other prizes. Currently, he is a professor of applied mathematics at MIT, and he is affiliated with CSAIL and the Center for Theoretical Physics (CTP).

After graduating from Tamalpais High School, in Mill Valley, California, in 1977, he won second prize at the International Math Olympiad in Yugoslavia, helping the US team to win.<ref>Mill Valley Historical Society, 2004, 'History of Homestead Valley'</ref><ref>Stephen R. Dunbar, 'Identifying Talent: American Mathematics Competitions,' in Mathematical Association of America, Focus, Vol 24, Issue 3, March 2004, p 29</ref> He received his B.S. in Mathematics in 1981 for undergraduate work at Caltech, and was a Putnam Fellow in 1978. He then earned his Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from MIT in 1985. His doctoral advisor was Tom Leighton, and his thesis was on probabilistic analysis of bin-packing algorithms. After graduating, he spent one year in a post-doctoral position at Berkeley, and then accepted a position at Bell Laboratories. Shor began his current MIT position in 2003. In the past, Shor has taught MIT courses 18.310: Principles of Applied Mathematics, 18.409: Quantum Information Science, 18.435: Quantum Computation, and 18.091: Mathematical Exposition. Shor always refers to Shor's Algorithm as "the Factoring Algorithm".