Dr. Dobb's Journal July 2003
Ronald Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman have been named winners of the 2002 Turing Award, in recognition of their "seminal contributions to the theory and practical application of public-key cryptography." The award is bestowed by the ACM, and carries a prize of $100,000.
Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman developed the RSA algorithm while working at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1977. While not the first public-key algorithm to be developed—Knapsack and the Diffie-Hellman key-agreement protocols were published earlier—RSA proved both practical and secure, and was put into use worldwide. The three scientists also founded RSA Security.
Rivest is now a professor in MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Shamir is a professor at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, and Adleman a professor of computer science and molecular biology at the University of Southern California.
John G. "Jack" Herriot, who taught the first programming class at Stanford University and helped to found the university's computer-science department, died on March 16, 2003. He was 87 years old.
Herriot began his career as a mathematician. In 1953, when Stanford acquired its first computer (an IBM Card Programmed Calculator), Herriot agreed to serve as director of the new Stanford Computation Center. Although the Computation Center originally served only a few faculty members, Herriot saw the potential of computers and worked to educate others. His "Math 139: Theory and Operation of Computing Machines" was the first programming course taught at Stanford, with 25 students attending the first year and 150 students enrolled 15 years later.
The Computation Center got its second computer in 1956, when Stanford bought an IBM 650—a machine about four times more powerful than the Card Programmed Calculator. Herriot also began teaching "Math 239: Computer Laboratory," which was part of a new math master's program in scientific computation. He continued as director of the Computation Center until 1961, and joined the Computer Science Department when it was founded in 1965. Over the course of his career, Herriot became acting chair of the department twice, served as editor of the Algorithms Department of Communications of the ACM, and published 40 works. He retired in 1982.
Stefano Bettelli, L. Serafini, and T. Calarco have proposed a high-level language suitable for programming quantum computers, if and when a practical version of such a computer is built. Theirs is an interpreted language, which introduces the idea of "quantum registers"—pointers to specific qubits within the computer—to hide the details of the quantum subsystem from the programmer. Programmers manipulate the registers via a set of quantum operators, which represent unitary transformations as objects.
Their article "Toward an Architecture for Quantum Programming" has been accepted by the European Physical Journal and is also available at http://arxiv.org/abs/cs/0103009/. The authors are also working on a C++ implementation of the ideas set forth in the paper—that code is available under the GNU General Public License from http://sra.itc.it/people/serafini/qlang/.
A new study from the Pew Internet and American Life project reveals that Internet use in America is leveling out. While 68 percent of Americans use the Internet regularly, the number is no longer accelerating. Where Internet usage rates climbed steadily for several years, in the last year, they have hovered at a flat level, and most nonusers say they will never go online.
Many people who do not use the Internet are still connected by proxy; they have family members who can perform online searches or send/receive e-mail for them. Another group says they used to use the Internet, but dropped offline because of technical problems like broken equipment. Still, about a quarter of Americans have no experience whatsoever with the Internet. Those who say they will probably never use the Web are most likely to be white, female, retired, and living in rural areas. For more information, see http://www.pewinternet.org/reports/toc.asp?Report=88.