Before 1976, we struggled to quickly and effectively test if a number was a prime number. Up to that point, we used Euler and Solovay-Strassen tests, and which struggled to effectively find some prime numbers. For example, both Euler and Solovay-Strassen often identify Carmichael numbers as prime numbers [here]. An example of a Carmichael number is 561, and it will pass the Euler and Solovay-Strassen tests, and be identified as a prime number (even though it is a compositive number, and made up of three factors).
Within a year, Rivest, Shamir and Adleman came up with a new way of using prime numbers to protect data — the RSA method. The method they used to find prime numbers was the Miller-Rabin method.
Michael O. Rabin was born in 1931 in Germany. In the 1960s he worked in the University of California and MIT, and then moved on to a Professorship at Harvard University. Finally, in 1981, he became a professor at the Hebrew University and has worked there ever since. Garry L Millier is a professor at Carnegie Mellon University. In 1976 he came up with a new method of determining primality [1]. It was based on the extended Riemann hypothesis [here]:
