Michael O. Rabin | Biography

Michael Rabin is particularly known for his work on the theory and application of computer algorithms. He is especially interested in computer security and the application of randomization in computers.

Michael Rabin was born in Breslau, Germany (known as Wroclav, Poland, since the end of the Second World War), in 1931. His father was from Russia and was a Rabbi, as were many of his forefathers. Recognizing the threat of remaining in Germany at this time the family moved to Palestine in 1935. Rabin went to a religious elementary school where he was initially interested in microbiology, though his interests soon changed to mathematics. Against his fathers wishes Rabin went to the Reali School, a school that specialized in the sciences (his father wanted him to attend a religious school prior to becoming a Rabbi). Rabin eventually entered the Hebrew University where he studied mathematics and was awarded an M.Sc. in algebra in 1953. During his studies Rabin became interested in computers (after reading of the work of Alan Turing in Metamathematics by S. C. Kleene). At this time Israel had no computers so to pursue this interest Rabin had to move to the United States. Initial studies at the State University of Pennsylvania soon gave way to Ph.D. studies in logic at Princeton University under Alonzo Church. Rabin's doctoral thesis showed that many problems concerning the mathematical field of groups could not be solved by computers. In 1957, while writing his thesis, Rabin was offered a summer job with IBM research (along with Dana S. Scott). Given free reign to research anything they wanted, the pair proposed a computer that could "guess" solutions using finite-state machines. The paper relating to this work was not published until 1959 and it had many ramifications for nondeterministic machines. After completing his thesis Rabin returned to IBM Research for another summer job and worked with John McCarthy. During this period Rabin came up with the idea of the one-way function (a function that is easy to compute in one direction but not the other). In 1974 Rabin returned to the use of randomness in computing to achieve results more quickly; randomness results in a small degree of error, but Rabin found that the increase in speed more than outweighs this problem. Work on cryptography, such as the RSA public key system, is built on the randomization process that Rabin discovered. In 1975 Rabin (while on sabbatical to MIT) discovered the work of Gary Miller on the Riemann Hypothesis, which lead Rabin to come up with the fastest known method of finding if a number is a prime.

As of 2001 Rabin is the Thomas J. Watson Professor of Computer Science at Harvard. In his quest for increased computer security Rabin uses sophisticated algorithms to prevent access. Rabin and his graduate student D. Tygar invented ITOSS (Integrated Toolkit for Operating System Security), a new model for computer security along with a set of tools that can be incorporated into operating systems to increase levels of security. Rabin is also the developer of IDA--the Information Dispersal Algorithm that is used to spread information within parallel computer arrays and networks as well as the storage of information in arrays of disks (RAID, Redundant Array of Independent Disks). Rabin is also working on the MCB system--a software environment to allow large processing to be carried out on multiple, connected workstations. MCB allows the usage of several computers as if they were one--this has the advantage of increased computing power and a high fault tolerance. This latter aspect of the MCB system is a direct result of the presence of the IDA software as an integral part of MCB. Rabin is also Albert Einstein Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He was awarded the ACM Turing award in 1976 (jointly with Dana S. Scott) for "their joint paper Finite Automata and Their Decision Problem, which introduced the idea of nondeterministic machines. Their (Scott & Rabin) classic paper has been a continuous source of inspiration for subsequent work in this field."

Rabin spends half of the year living in the United States working at Harvard and the rest of the year working in Jerusalem at the Hebrew University. His family lives in Jerusalem full time.