A. O. L. Atkin

Arthur Oliver Lonsdale Atkin (July 31, 1925 – December 28, 2008), who published under the name A. O. L. Atkin, was a Professor Emeritus of mathematics at the University of Illinois at Chicago. As an undergraduate during World War II, he worked at Bletchley Park cracking German codes.^[1] He received his Ph.D. in 1952 from the University of Cambridge, where he was one of John Littlewood's research students.^[2] During 1964–1970, he worked at the Atlas Computer Laboratory at Chilton, computing modular functions.

Atkin, along with Noam Elkies, extended Schoof's algorithm to create the Schoof–Elkies–Atkin algorithm. Together with Daniel J. Bernstein, he developed the sieve of Atkin.

Atkin is also known for his work on properties of the integer partition function and the monster module. He was an enormous fan of using computers in mathematics, so long as the end goal was theoretical advance: "Each new generation of machines makes feasible a whole new range of computations; provided mathematicians pursue these rather than merely break old records for old sports, computation will have a significant part to play in the development of mathematics."^[3]

Atkin died of hospital-acquired pneumonia on December 28, 2008, in Maywood, Illinois.^[4]

Selected publications

• Atkin, A. O. L. and Lehner, J. (1970), "Hecke operators on Γ0 (m)", Mathematische Annalen 185: 134–160, doi:10.1007/BF01359701, MR0268123, ISSN 0025-5831.
• Atkin, A. O. L. and Morain, F. "Elliptic Curves and Primality Proving." Math. Comput. 61, 29-68, 1993.
• Atkin, A. O. L. and Bernstein, D. J. Prime sieves using binary quadratic forms, Math. Comp. 73 (2004), 1023-1030.[1].

See also

• Atkin-Goldwasser-Kilian-Morain certificate
• Atkin–Lehner theory
• Elliptic curve primality proving

References

1. ^ "Gordon Bamford Preston". http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Printonly/Preston.html. 
2. ^ A. O. L. Atkin at the Mathematics Genealogy Project.
3. ^ Birch, B. "Atkin and the Atlas Lab," in Buell, D. A. and Teitelbaum, J. T. Computational perspectives on number theory. American Mathematical Society, 1998. Pp. 13-20.
4. ^ "Note from Henrietta Atkin". http://listserv.nodak.edu/cgi-bin/wa.exe?A2=ind0812&L=nmbrthry&T=0&F=&S=&P=3246. 

External links

• Atkin's university webpage
• Atkin's info at The Prime Pages

Persondata
Name	Atkin, A. O. L.
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	July 31, 1925
Place of birth
Date of death	December 28, 2008
Place of death