Peter Shor (born August 14, 1959) is an American theoretical computer scientist most famous for his work on quantum computation, in particular for devising a quantum algorithm for factoring exponentially faster than the best currently-known algorithm running on a classical computer (see Shor's algorithm). He was working then at AT&T Bell Laboratories in 1994. He was the recipient of the Nevanlinna Prize in 1998, a MacArthur Fellowship in 1999, and a Gödel prize in 1999 among other prizes. Currently, he is a professor of applied mathematics at MIT, and he is affiliated with CSAIL.
He received his B.S. in Mathematics in 1981 for undergraduate work at Caltech, and was a Putnam Fellow in 1978. He then earned his Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from MIT in 1985. His doctoral advisor was Tom Leighton, and his thesis was on probabilistic analysis of bin-packing algorithms. After graduating, he spent one year in a post-doctoral position at Berkeley, and then accepted a position at Bell Laboratories. Shor began his current MIT position in 2003.