Ernst Sejersted Selmer

Ernest S. Selmer was born in Oslo in the family of Prof. Ernst W. Selmer and Ella Selmer born Sejersted. Already in school he shows talents to mathematics. In 1938 he won Crown Prince Olav's Mathematics Prize for high school graduates. In 1942-1943 he was studied at the University of Oslo. In 1943, when the Germans closed the University, he escaped to Sweden. In 1944 Selmer was sent to London, where he took technical responsibility for all Norwegian military and civilian cipher machines. The communication was mainly on Hagelin cipher machine. When the war ended, Selmer came back to Norway and 1946 was hired as a lecturer in the University of Oslo. In the same year he starts working for the Cipher Department of the Armed Forces Security Service as a consultant. He with colleges built a communication system for Norwegian equivalent of MI5 for police, which was used from 1949 till 1960. Spring of 1949 Selmer spent in the Cambridge University working with a famous mathematician JWS Cassels. As a result of their collaboration, a group of an Abelian variety was discovered and named after Selmer, the Selmer group. In 1993 , Andrew Wiles uses Selmer group in his proof of the Fermat's last theorem.

Selmer got the dr.philos. degree in 1952 and was hired as a lecturer at the University of Oslo in the same year.

He received a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship to study in the United States for the years 1951-1952.[3] He arrived in January 1951 as a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. where the IAS computer was being constructed for John von Neumann. From Princeton, Selmer traveled to Berkeley where he contributed to Paul Morton's construction of the CALDIC computer. He was hired by Consolidated Engineering Corporation (CEC) (on von Neumann's recommendation) in late 1951 and designed much of the logic for their Datatron computer , working closely with other CEC employees such as Sibyl M. Rock.[4] Later the computer was named Burroughs 205 and it was the most serious competitor of IBM 650. He returned to the Institute for Advanced Study again as a visiting scholar in 1952.[5] In late 1952, Selmer return to Oslo and started working on a creation of military computer in Norway. A result of this work was built a computer, which was installed in the Defense Research Institute in 1957.

On September 25, 1953 Selmer applied for a U.S. Patent for an Electronic Adder. This patent, No. 2,947,479, was awarded on August 2, 1960.[6]

In 1957 Selmer took a position of a full professor in mathematics at the University of Bergen, where he designed two ciphers for NATO. In1962, a hotline between the Kremlin and Washington was established via the Norwegian-developed encryption equipment ETCRRM II  (Electronic Teleprinter Cryptographic Regenerative Repeater Mixer) from STK.

At the University of Bergen Selmer starts studying Linear Shift Registers and lectured on the subject. He commissioned a theoretical basis for linear shift register sequences in the 1960s on behalf of the Cipher Department. Him lecture notes "Linear Recurrence Relations over Finite Fields" was published several times.

Norwegian-developed mathematical theory became an important contribution to the modernization of crypto-algorithms in NATO and the NSA. Selmer's advanced research formed the basis for National Security Agency to develop modern crypto machines.[7]

He was a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.[8]

In his lecture on EUROCRYPT'93[2], Ernst Sejersted Selmer gives an overview of what he has contributed to the crypto field.

In honor of Prof. Ernst Sejersted Selmer the University of Bergen established the Selmer Center in 2003. The Selmer Center held a leading position in the field of cryptography nationally and internationally with roots go back 70 years.

• Selmer, Ernst S. (1966), Linear recurrence relations over finite fields, Department of Mathematics, University of Bergen

• interview with Selmer
• Selmer center