Developer of the irrational base discrete weighted transform, an important method of finding very large primes, Crandall made significant contributions to computational number theory. He served, at various times, as Chief Scientist at NeXT Inc. and Apple's Chief Cryptographer. He was 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 Erdős number is 2. Crandall was awarded numerous patents for his work in the field of cryptography. He also owned and operated PSI Press, an online publishing company.
Among the books he authored or co-authored are: Pascal Applications for the Sciences, John Wiley & Sons, New York 1983; with M. M. Colgrove: Scientific Programming with Macintosh Pascal, John Wiley & Sons, New York 1986; Mathematica for the Sciences, Addison-Wesley, Reading, Mass, 1991; Projects in Scientific Computation, Springer 1994; Topics in Advanced Scientific Computation, Springer 1996; with M. Levich: A Network Orange, Springer 1997; and with C. Pomerance: Prime Numbers: A Computational Perspective, Springer 2001.
