News Release

CARL POMERANCE WINS 
AMS CONANT PRIZE

January 11, 2001

PROVIDENCE, RIóCarl Pomerance, a mathematician at Lucent Technologies/Bell Laboratories and a research professor emeritus at the University of Georgia, has won the 2001 Levi L. Conant Prize. Presented by the American Mathematical Society, the Conant Prize is awarded for an outstanding expository article in the Notices of the AMS or the Bulletin of the AMS in the past five years.  The prize will be awarded today at the Joint Mathematics Meetings in New Orleans.

Dr. Pomerance is being honored for his article "A Tale of Two Sieves" (Notices of the AMS, volume 43, number 2, 1996).  The citation states: "The paper gives an elegant and attractive introduction to factorization methods in modern number theory, starting from elementary examples and leading to the state-of-the-art method, the number field sieve, used at the time of writing to crack a 130-digit RSA challenge number."

Founded in 1888 to further mathematical research and scholarship, the 30,000-member American Mathematical Society fulfills its mission through programs and services that promote mathematical research and its uses, strengthen mathematical education, and foster awareness and appreciation of mathematics and its connections to other disciplines and to everyday life.