Paul Zimmermann (mathematician)

Paul Zimmermann (born 13 November 1964) is a French computational mathematician, working at INRIA.

Paul Zimmermann, January 2006

Education

After engineering studies at École Polytechnique 1984 to 1987, he got a master's degree in computer science in 1988 from University Paris VII and a magister from École Normale Supérieure in mathematics and computer science. His doctoral degree from École Polytechnique in 1991 was entitled Séries génératrices et analyse automatique d’algorithmes,^[1] and advised by Philippe Flajolet.^[2]

Research

His interests include asymptotically fast arithmetic.

He has developed some of the fastest available code for manipulating polynomials over GF(2),^[3] and for calculating hypergeometric constants to billions of decimal places.^[4] He is associated with the CARAMEL project to develop efficient arithmetic, in a general context and in particular in the context of algebraic curves of small genus; arithmetic on polynomials of very large degree turns out to be useful in algorithms for point-counting on such curves. He is also interested in computational number theory. In particular, he has contributed to some of the record computations in integer factorisation^[5] and discrete logarithm.^[6]

Zimmermann co-authored the book Computational Mathematics, published in 2018 on SageMath^[7] used by Mathematical students worldwide.

In 2010, he co-authored a book on algorithms for computer arithmetic with Richard Brent.^[8]

He has been an active developer of the GMP-ECM implementation of the elliptic curve method for integer factorisation and of MPFR, an arbitrary precision floating point library with correct rounding. He is also a coauthor of the CADO-NFS software tool, which was used to factor RSA-240 in record time.^[9]

In a 2014 blog post,^[10] Zimmermann said that he would refuse invitations to review papers submitted to gold (author-pays) open access and hybrid open access journals, because he disagrees with the publication mechanism.