Claus-Peter Schnorr is a distinguished German

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

 mathematician

Mathematics

Mathematics is the study of quantity, space, structure, and change. Mathematicians seek out patterns and formulate new conjectures. Mathematicians resolve the truth or falsity of conjectures by mathematical proofs, which are arguments sufficient to convince other mathematicians of their validity...

 and cryptographer

Cryptography

Cryptography is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of third parties...

. He received his Ph.D.

Doctor of Philosophy

Doctor of Philosophy, abbreviated as Ph.D., PhD, D.Phil., or DPhil , in English-speaking countries, is a postgraduate academic degree awarded by universities...

 from the University of Saarbrücken

Saarland University

Saarland University is a university located in Saarbrücken, the capital of the German state of Saarland, and Homburg. It was founded in 1948 in Homburg in co-operation with France and is organized in 8 faculties that cover all major fields of science...

 in 1966, and his habilitation

Habilitation

Habilitation is the highest academic qualification a scholar can achieve by his or her own pursuit in several European and Asian countries. Earned after obtaining a research doctorate, such as a PhD, habilitation requires the candidate to write a professorial thesis based on independent...

 in 1970. Schnorr's contributions to cryptography include his study of Schnorr groups, which are used in the digital signature algorithm

Schnorr signature

In cryptography, a Schnorr signature is a digital signature produced by the Schnorr signature algorithm. Its security is based on the intractability of certain discrete logarithm problems. It is considered the simplest digital signature scheme to be provably secure in a random oracle model . It is...

 bearing his name. Besides this, Schnorr is known for his contributions to algorithmic information theory

Algorithmic information theory

Algorithmic information theory is a subfield of information theory and computer science that concerns itself with the relationship between computation and information...

 and for creating an approach to the definition of an algorithmically random sequence

Algorithmically random sequence

Intuitively, an algorithmically random sequence is an infinite sequence ofbinary digits that appears random to any algorithm...

 which is alternative to the concept of Martin-Löf randomness.

Schnorr is currently professor of mathematics and computer science

Computer science

Computer science or computing science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and of practical techniques for their implementation and application in computer systems...

 at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe university

Johann Wolfgang Goethe University of Frankfurt am Main

The Goethe University Frankfurt was founded in 1914 as a Citizens' University, which means that, while it was a State university of Prussia, it had been founded and financed by the wealthy and active liberal citizenry of Frankfurt am Main, a unique feature in German university history...

 at Frankfurt

Frankfurt

Frankfurt am Main , commonly known simply as Frankfurt, is the largest city in the German state of Hesse and the fifth-largest city in Germany, with a 2010 population of 688,249. The urban area had an estimated population of 2,300,000 in 2010...

. He is also a Distinguished Associate of RSA Laboratories

RSA Security

RSA, the security division of EMC Corporation, is headquartered in Bedford, Massachusetts, United States, and maintains offices in Australia, Ireland, Israel, the United Kingdom, Singapore, India, China, Hong Kong and Japan....

, and a joint recipient of the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize

The Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize is a research prize awarded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft every year since 1985 to scientists working in Germany. This highest German research prize consists of a research grant of 2.5 million euro, to be used within seven years...

in 1993.