Richard E. Crandall (December 29, 1947 – December 20, 2012) was an Americanphysicist andcomputer scientist who made contributions tocomputational number theory.
Crandall was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and spent two years atCaltech before transferring toReed College in Portland, Oregon, where he graduated in physics and wrote his undergraduate thesis on randomness.[1] He earned his Ph.D. in theoretical physics fromMassachusetts Institute of Technology.[2]
In 1978, he became a physics professor at Reed College, where he taught courses in experimental physics and computational physics for many years, ultimately becoming Vollum Professor of Science and director of the Center for Advanced Computation.[3] He was also, at various times, Chief Scientist atNeXT, Inc., Chief Cryptographer and Distinguished Scientist atApple, and head of Apple's Advanced Computation Group.
He was a pioneer in experimental mathematics. He developed theirrational base discrete weighted transform, a method of finding very large primes. He wrote several books and many scholarly papers on scientific programming and computation.
Crandall was awarded numerous patents for his work in the field ofcryptography. He also wrote a poker program that couldbluff. He owned and operated PSI Press, an online publishing company.
Crandall was partCherokee and proud of his Native heritage.[4] He fronted a band called the Chameleons in 1981.[5] He was working on an intellectual biography of Steve Jobs when he collapsed at his home in Portland, Oregon, from acuteleukemia. He died 10 days later, on December 20, 2012, at the age of 64.[6]
