Jeffrey Shallit
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Jeffrey Outlaw Shallit (born 1957) is a computer scientist, number theorist, and a noted advocate for civil liberties on the Internet. He is married to Anna Lubiw, also a computer scientist.
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Early life and education
Shallit was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1957. His father was Joseph Shallit, a journalist and author, and a son of Jewish immigrants from Vitebsk, Russia (now in Belarus). His mother was Louise Lee Outlaw Shallit, a writer. He has one brother, Jonathan Shallit, a music professor.
He earned a Bachelor's degree in mathematics from Princeton University in June 1979. He received a Ph.D., also in mathematics, from the University of California, Berkeley in June 1983. His doctoral thesis was entitled Metric Theory of Pierce Expansions and his advisor was Manuel Blum.
Advocacy
Since 1996, Shallit has held the position of Vice-President of Electronic Frontier Canada, a Canadian chapter of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
In 1997, he gained attention for the publication on the Internet of Holocaust Revised: Lies of Our Times (also called the Shallit Report), a reprint of an article he had written for a Waterloo student publication in 1993, which detailed the backgrounds and past statements of various persons whom he accused of being Holocaust revisionists, notably David Irving, Fred A. Leuchter, and Eustace Mullins. This triggered a public exchange of letters between himself and Irving.
Professional life
Shallit is presently a Professor in the School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo. His primary academic interests are combinatorics on words, formal languages, automata theory, and algorithmic number theory.
His publications include Algorithmic Number Theory (with Eric Bach), a noted text on algorithms, and Automatic Sequences: Theory, Applications, Generalizations (with Jean-Paul Allouche).
He has an Erdős number of 1, from a joint publication with Paul Erdős in 1991.
External links
- Home page of Jeffrey O. Shallit (http://www.cs.uwaterloo.ca/~shallit/)
- Electronic Frontier Canada (http://www.efc.ca/)
- Holocaust Revised: Lies of our Times (http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/people/s/shallit-jeffrey/)