The 2015 Richard D. Jenks Memorial Prize for Excellence in Software Engineering Applied to Computer Algebra was awarded on October 30, 2015 at the Fields Institute in Toronto during the Major Thematic Program on Computer Algebra to Professor Victor Shoup for NTL: A Library for doing Number Theory.

NTL, an open source C++ library was begun by Victor Shoup in 1990 as a demonstration that FFT-based polynomial arithmetic can be put into practice for exact polynomials over finite fields and the integers. An early highlight is the successful implementation of the then new univariate factoring algorithms for polynomials over finite fields of large characteristic. Fast lattice basis reduction algorithms were added, which, in a supporter's words, ``democratized the use of efficient lattice reduction algorithms, which has been particularly useful in public-key crypto-analysis.'' Today NTL forms the bottom layer of HElib, a Homomorphic Encryption Library, and now supports multi-threaded programming in the new standards of C++, namely C++11.

Victor Shoup over the past 25 years has diligently maintained and updated his software, with contributions from others, e.g., LIP was initially used for long integer arithmetic. NTL is a computer algebra library that does several basic computer algebra and number theory tasks exceptionally well, and therefore has been put into use in other open source computer algebra software, e.g., SINGULAR.

From left to right: Erich Kaltofen (Jenks Prize Committee Chair), Victor Shoup, Keith Geddes (Jenks Prize Co-Winner 2011), Ilias Kotsireas (SIGSAM Chair and Jenks Prize Committee Member), Mark Giesbrecht (Jenks Prize Committee Member).

Home

Calls for Nominations

Awards

Procedures

Richard Jenks Bio

Administration