Richard E. Crandall

On this day, physicist and computer scientist Richard E. Crandall was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan (December 29, 1947 – December 20, 2012). Crandall was mainly known in the science community for his contributions to computational number theory and cryptography; in the business world he was more widely known for being the Chief Scientist at NeXT Inc. and Apple’s Chief Cryptographer. The picture below shows Crandall (left) with Steve Jobs (credit Reed magazine’s obituary at http://www.reed.edu/reed_magazine/sallyportal/posts/2012/prof.-richard-crandall-dead-at-64.html ). At the time of his death Crandall was the Vollum Adjunct Professor of Science and director of the Center for Advanced Computation at Reed College, Portland, Oregon. Crandall’s research led to the development of the irrational base discrete weighted transform, an important method of finding very large primes. Crandall grow up in Los Angeles and taught himself calculus at the age of 11. He spent two years at Caltech, attending lectures by Richard Feynman, before coming to Reed College in 1967. Some of Feynman’s spirit must have rubbed off on Crandall, who, later in life, delighted in constructing experiments on a cheap budget. For example demonstrating the Doppler shift in visible light using a couple of old stereo speakers. At Reed he majored in physics and wrote a thesis on some physical manifestations of randomness with Nicholas Wheeler. This quote from his obituary by Chris Legate (well worth reading at http://www.reed.edu/reed_magazine/march2013/articles/web_special/crandall.html ) sums up his character quite well: “In April of his senior year, he made a terrible confession—he had lost his thesis draft at the Lutz Tavern. “He wasn’t terribly concerned,” Wheeler remembers. Always a fast worker, Richard simply rewrote his thesis from scratch and graduated on time. After passing his orals, he revealed that he had also (unbeknownst to anyone) written a second thesis in math, which was approved by John Leadley [mathematics 1956–93].” In 1978, after working in industry for sometime, he returned to Reed. From this point on, Reed was where he was based, with sabbaticals at NeXT and Apple computers after meeting Steve Jobs in 1982. At the time of his death on December 20, 2012, Crandall was the Vollum Adjunct Professor of Science and director of the Center for Advanced Computation at Reed College. Crandall died in Portland, Oregon on the morning of December 20, 2012 after a short bout with acute leukemia. He was 64 years old.

Date in History: 29 December 1947