George B. Purdy

George Barry Purdy is a mathematician and computer scientist who specializes in combinatorial geometry and number theory. He is the namesake of the Purdy polynomial used in operating systems (e.g., OpenVMS^[2]) to hash user passwords.

Purdy received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in 1972, under the supervision of Paul T. Bateman.^[1] He worked in the mathematics department at Texas A&M University, and is now a professor of computer science at the University of Cincinnati.

He coauthored a number of papers with Paul Erdős, and is the "P" in G.W. Peck, a pseudonym for a group of six mathematicians that includes Purdy.^[3]

Selected publications

• Erdős, Paul; Purdy, George B. (September 1978). "Some combinatorial problems in the plane". Journal of Combinatorial Theory, Series A (Elsevier) 25 (2): 205–210. doi:10.1016/0097-3165(78)90085-7. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6WHS-4CTN22H-G&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=ae57f3c58472d8f323dca11eb8c95896. 
• Purdy, George B. (2006). "A Collision-free Cryptographic Hash Function Based on Factorization". Congressus Numerantium 180: 161–166. 
• Purdy, George B. (December, 1988). "Repeated Angles in E₄". Discrete and Computational Geometry (Springer New York) 3 (1): 73–75. doi:10.1007/BF02187897. ISSN 0179-5376. http://www.springerlink.com/content/f027172k260vjh76/. 

References