The American Chemical Society has awarded Krzysztof Matyjaszewski, a polymer chemist at Carnegie Mellon University, its 2004 Cooperative Research Award in Polymer Science and Engineering.
Matyjaszewski, director of the Center for Macromolecular Engineering, was recognized for developing atom transfer radical polymerization, a controlled process for producing complex polymers. It can be used for producing a wide range of materials, from scratch-resistant paint coating to drug delivery implants.
Gary Miller, a CMU professor of computer science, is co-winner of this year's Kanellakis Award for Theory and Practice, a $5,000 prize presented by the Association for Computing Machinery.
Miller and his co-winners from Harvard University, the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Konstanz, Germany, were recognized for developing efficient ways of determining whether a number is prime ---- that is, divisible only by itself and 1.
Their algorithms make it possible to generate very large prime numbers, an essential part of most cryptographic systems today.
First Published: April 18, 2004, 4:00 a.m.