Paul Zimmermann (born 13 November 1964) is a French computational mathematician, working at INRIA.
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.
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.
^Zimmermann, Paul; Cheng, Howard; Hanrot, Guillaume; Thomé, Emmanuel; Zima, Eugene (2007). Brown, C. W. (ed.). Time- and Space-Efficient Evaluation of Some Hypergeometric Constants. Proceedings of International Symposium on Symbolic and Algebraic Computation (ISSAC) 2007. pp. 85–91.
