Crandall was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and spent two years at Caltech before transferring to Reed College in Portland, Oregon, where he graduated in physics and wrote his undergraduate thesis on randomness.
He developed the irrational base discrete weighted transform, a method of finding very large primes.
Crandall was awarded numerous patents for his work in the field of cryptography.
He owned and operated PSI Press, an online publishing company.
[5] He was working on an intellectual biography of Steve Jobs when he collapsed at his home in Portland, Oregon, from acute leukemia.