Kevin McCurley (cryptographer)

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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]

Early life and education[]

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]

Career[]

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]

Miscellany[]

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]

Bets about P vs NP[]

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?]}

References[]

External links[]

• Kevin McCurley's personal home page
• Selected publications

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