Doc. Math. J. DMV 133 The Work of Peter W. Shor

Much of the work of Peter Shor has a strong geometrical avor typically coupled with deep ideas from probability complexity theory or combinatorics and always woven together with brilliance and insight of the rst magnitude Due to the space limitations of this note I will restrict myself to brief descriptions of just four of his remarkable achievements unfortunately omitting discussions of his seminal work on randomized incremental algorithms of fundamental importance in computational geometry and his provocative results in computational biology on self assembling virus shells