Colin Percival
Canadian programmer and computer scientist
Colin A. Percival (born c. 1980) is a Canadian computer scientist and computer security researcher. He completed his undergraduate education at Simon Fraser University and a doctorate at the University of Oxford. While at university he joined the FreeBSD project, and achieved some notoriety for discovering a security weakness in Intel's hyper-threading technology. Besides his work in delta compression and the introduction of memory-hard functions, he is also known for developing the Tarsnap online backup service, which became his full-time job.
In November 2023, he became FreeBSD's engineering lead.
Education
Percival began taking mathematics courses at Simon Fraser University (SFU) at age 13, as a student at Burnaby Central Secondary School. He graduated from Burnaby Central and officially enrolled at SFU in 1998. At SFU he studied number theory under Peter Borwein, and competed in the William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition, placing in the top 15 in 1998 and as a Putnam Fellow (in the top six) in 1999. From 1998 to 2000 he ran the PiHex project, organizing contributors from all over the world to help calculate specific bits of pi.
“Colin Percival” enters the record as canadian programmer and computer scientist. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Colin, Percival and Canadian can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Colin Percival” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.