George Barry Purdy (20 February 1944 – 30 December 2017)[2] was a mathematician and computer scientist who specialized in cryptography, combinatorial geometry, and number theory.
Peck, a pseudonym for the group of mathematicians that also included Ronald Graham, Douglas West, Paul Erdős, Fan Chung, and Daniel Kleitman.
[4] In 1971, Purdy was asked by Larry Roberts, the director of the DARPA Information Processing Techniques Office, to develop a secure hash function to protect passwords on ARPANET.
A DEC report said they chose it because it was very secure and because the existing standard DES could not be exported, which meant that an alternative was needed.
[8][9] It came to the attention of György Elekes, who eventually proved the conjecture as the first application of new tools from algebraic geometry that he was developing.