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Oliver Atkin

Number Theory and Cryptography Expert Remembered for his Deep Engagement with Mathematics and Music

Oliver Atkin, professor emeritus in the Department of Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science, was an expert in Number Theory, one of the oldest branches of pure mathematics, and was a pioneer in the application of computers to number theory. He worked in many areas, but some of his most famous work concerned some simple problems. For example, he developed very sophisticated methods for determining if a number is prime even if the number has hundreds or thousands of digits. He also studied partitions in detail, where a partition means a way of writing a number as a sum of smaller numbers: 3+2 and 2+1+1+1 are both partitions of five. His deepest work concerned modular forms, an area of mathematics that sits at the intersection of analysis, geometry, and algebra. The theory of modular forms is one of the most exciting and active areas of mathematical research today. Oliver had crucial insights into congruences among modular forms that I believe laid the foundation for the massive body of work on p-adic modular forms today. He managed to find a way to improve the sieve of Eratosthenes, together with Dan Bernstein, leading to the creation of the ‘Sieve of Atkin.’ I think it’s safe to say that a huge percentage of the papers written in the subject mention Oliver’s name in some way.

He received the National Science Foundation grant award for special creativity the first time it was awarded for algebra. But he was also notorious for not publishing his work—he circulated papers on Number Theory listservs and through informal conversations—but this did not diminish his influence. I organized a one-day meeting last Spring at UIC and several of the talks proved to involve work in which Atkin—at age 83—was actively collaborating.

His appearance was distinctive. He had a scraggly beard, his typical attire was a track suit, and he carried his work in a plastic bag salvaged from the grocery store. I was often amused by the expression on young people’s faces at conferences when this rather eccentric looking guy would raise his hand at the end of a talk and ask some penetrating question about the mathematics being described. For many years he could be seen around Oak Park walking his two huge Newfoundland dogs.

Atkin was recruited to work on the British code-breaking project during WWII and spent several years of the war at Bletchley Park. When I asked him to speak at a seminar on cryptography about this work, he told me that for thirty years people had been telling him to forget all about it, and he’d mostly succeeded; but he did manage to dredge up some recollections of his work on breaking one of the German cipher-machine codes related to the Enigma code. He was known for the Schoof-Elkies-Atkin algorithm used in cryptography.

Atkin was a great musician who played the organ for churches around Chicago. He preferred churches where the organist wore robes, because that meant he could wear his track suit to services.

To learn a little more about his distinctive personality, I refer you to the article "Atkin and the Atlas Lab" by Bryan Birch, published in a Festschrifft in his honor that grew out of a conference I organized with Duncan Buell in honor of his retirement from UIC in 1994.

When former LAS Senior Associate Dean and Professor of Mathematics Jeremy Teitelbaum learned that his former colleague, Oliver Atkin, had passed away in late December 2008, he circulated a note to his mathematics colleagues telling them a little bit about Oliver Atkin’s legacy. Teitelbaum, now the dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Connecticut, has graciously allowed us to excerpt here his remembrance of a colleague who left a profound impression on everyone he met.