Ezra Abraham "Bud" Brown (born January 22, 1944, in Reading, Pennsylvania) is an American mathematician active in combinatorics, algebraic number theory, elliptic curves, graph theory, expository mathematics and cryptography.
He spent most of his career at Virginia Tech where he is now Alumni Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Mathematics.
[2] He then studied mathematics at Louisiana State University (LSU), getting an MS in 1967 and a PhD in 1969 with the dissertation "Representations of Discriminantal Divisors by Binary Quadratic Forms" under Gordon Pall.
[4][5][1] Brown became interested in elliptic curves while at LSU and this has remained one of his principal areas of research along with quadratic forms and algebraic number theory in general.
At the age of 16 Brown taught himself to play the piano, and in college he acted in several musicals and joined an a cappella chorus.