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About Peter
Peter Shor is the Henry Adams Morss and Henry Adams Morss, Jr. Professor of Applied Mathematics in the Mathematics department at MIT - Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He earned a B.A. in mathematics from the California Institute of Technology in 1981 and a Ph.D. in applied mathematics from MIT in 1985 under the supervision of Tom Leighton. Following his doctorate, Shor held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley, California. From 1986 to 2003, he served as a member of the technical staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories. In 2003, he joined the MIT faculty as a full professor in applied mathematics and was appointed the Morss Professor that same year. Since 2015, he has been Chair of the Applied Mathematics Committee at MIT.
Shor's primary research interests are in quantum computation and quantum information theory, building on earlier work in algorithms, computational geometry, combinatorics, and probability theory. He is best known for Shor's algorithm, detailed in his 1994 paper 'Algorithms for quantum computation: discrete logarithms and factoring,' presented at the Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science, and its journal version 'Polynomial-time algorithms for prime factorization and discrete logarithms on a quantum computer' (SIAM Journal of Computing, 1997). This breakthrough enables quantum computers to factor large integers efficiently, threatening RSA encryption. In 1995, he introduced the first quantum error-correcting codes in 'Scheme for reducing decoherence in quantum computer memory' (Physical Review A), paving the way for fault-tolerant quantum computing. Additional key publications include 'Fault-tolerant quantum computation' (1996), 'Quantum error correction and orthogonal geometry' (1997, with Calderbank, Rains, and Sloane), and 'The Quantum Reverse Shannon Theorem and Resource Tradeoffs for Simulating Quantum Channels' (2014, IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, co-authored with Bennett, Devetak, Harrow, and Winter; 2017 IEEE Information Theory Society Paper Award). Shor's contributions have profoundly shaped quantum computing, earning him the Nevanlinna Prize (1998), Gödel Prize (1999), MacArthur Fellowship (1999), King Faisal International Prize (2002), Dirac Medal (2017), Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics (2023), and the 2025 Claude E. Shannon Award. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences (2002), National Academy of Engineering (2020), American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2011), and delivered MIT's 2022-2023 James R. Killian Jr. Faculty Achievement Award lecture.
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