Richard E. Crandall is an American computer scientist and physicist who has made contributions to computational number theory.
He is most notable for the development of the irrational base discrete weighted transform, an important method of finding very large primes. He has, at various times, been Chief Scientist at NeXT Inc. and Apple's Chief Cryptographer. He is currently Vollum Adjunct Professor of Science and director of the Center for Advanced Computation at Reed College. He fronted a band called the Chameleons in 1981. His Erd?s number is 2.
He has been awarded numerous patents for his work in the field of cryptography.