Peter Shor

Applied Mathematics Professor Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

Peter Shor is Morss Professor of Applied Mathematics since 2003. He received the B.A. in mathematics from Caltech in 1981, and the Ph.D. in applied mathematics from MIT in 1985, under the direction of Tom Leighton. Following a postdoctoral fellowship at MSRI, he joined AT&T. He was a member of its Research staff, 1986-2003. He joined the MIT faculty in applied mathematics as full professor in 2003. Professor Shor's research interests are in theoretical computer science: currently on algorithms, quantum computing, computational geometry and combinatorics. In 1998, Peter Shor received the Nevanlinna Prize and the International Quantum Communication Award. He also received the Dickson Prize in Science from Carnegie-Mellon in 1998. He was awarded the Gödel Prize of the ACM and a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1999. He received the King Faisal International Prize in Science in 2002, and was named one of Caltech's Distinguished Alumni in 2007. He is a member of the National Academy of Science (2002), and fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2011). In 2017, Professor Shor received the Dirac Medal of the International Centre for Theoretical Physics. He also received the 2017 IEEE Information Theory Society Paper Award, jointly with Charles Bennett, Igor Devetak, Aram Harrow, and Andreas Winter for the paper "The Quantum Reverse Shannon Theorem and Resource Tradeoffs for Simulating Quantum Channels" which appeared in the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, vol. 60, no. 5, pp. 2926–2959, May 2014. In 2018, Shor received the IEEE Eric E. Sumner Award, for Outstanding Contributions to Communications Technology. He also received the 2018 Micius Quantum Prize in April 2019. In May 2022, Shor was named the recipient of MIT's 2022-2023 James R. Killian Jr. Faculty Achievement Award, the highest honor the Institute faculty can bestow upon one of its members each academic year. The award citation credits Peter's "seminal contributions that have forever shaped the foundations of quantum computing. Indeed, quantum computing exists today, in practice, because of Peter Shor." As of 2020, Shor is a Member of the National Academy of Engineering, and in 2022 Fellow of the AMS. Prof. Shor also won the Lise Meitner Distinguished Lecture and Medal in 2022, the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics in 2023, and the 2025 Claude E. Shannon Award (announced July 2024, to be presented in June 2025).