Professor Andrew Odlyzko retires from School of Mathematics
MINNEAPOLIS / ST. PAUL (10/2/2025) – School of Mathematics Professor Andrew Odlyzko retired on May 25th, 2025, after a 50-year mathematics career in industry and academia. Odlyzko, who joined the University of Minnesota faculty in 2001, spent the past five decades deeply involved in a variety of interconnected research areas including number theory, combinatorics, analysis, probability theory, economics, and computer science.
Launchpad for a mathematical mind
Although he was born in Poland, Odlyzko and his family immigrated to the United States when he was a child. In 1967, he began his academic journey with undergraduate studies at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). In the beginning, Odlyzko’s interests were divided among several fields of research, including biochemistry, physics and mathematics. “What drew me to mathematics was the attraction of clean logical arguments,” he says. “When I started college, I was sure I wanted an academic research career, but several fields looked interesting. By about the middle of the sophomore year, though, I decided none other than math was attractive enough. The process of discovering this was long, interesting, and amusing, but would take far too long to describe.”
Odlyzko says his journey to majoring in math is somewhat akin to that of Andrey Kolmogorov, one of the giants of 20th century mathematics:
“Kolmogorov did some significant research in history as a graduate student. However, (or so the story goes) his advisor told him that in history, to win acceptance of a new theory, he would need to prove it in at least three different ways! Supposedly that's what made him decide to go into math, where a single proof was sufficient. After my extensive forays into economic history, I am in a position to appreciate both the advice of Kolmogorov's teacher, and the beauty of math, most of all that there are relatively clear standards for correctness, and a single proof suffices. Especially when one takes a contrarian view (as I have been doing), it is very hard to get acceptance of novel results and insights in fields such as history. So even though I have moved away from math research, I have an even greater appreciation for it than I had before.”
“My career was influenced strongly by a number of serendipitous incidents,” Odlyzko says. “For example, in my senior year in college, Prof. Jack van Lint from the Eindhoven Institute of Technology visited Caltech on a sabbatical, and gave a course on error-correcting codes. He was an excellent teacher, and the subject also "grabbed" me, so I decided to get more deeply into it. That influenced my choice of graduate school, and also led to contacts and summer jobs at Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and at Bell Labs.” At JPL, Odlyzko worked in the mathematics group, where he got hands-on experience in cutting-edge research areas in mathematics and computer science, such as linear programming.
Inspired by his mentors and his work at JPL, Odlyzko went on to complete his PhD studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Over the course of his graduate studies – which included a course from Prof. William Messing, who would later join the faculty at the University of Minnesota – Odlyzko’s interest honed in on analytic number theory. (Messing retired from UMN in 2020, and with Odlyzko’s retirement, the two are once again united among the ranks of Professors Emeriti.) Under the guidance of Prof. Harold Stark, Odlyzko completed his PhD thesis on bounds for discriminants of number fields in 1975. This work would turn out to be the trailhead for a 50-year career journey in number theory.
From Bell Labs to bubbles
Upon completion of his PhD, Odlyzko joined the technical staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories. He worked alongside nearly 80 other mathematics researchers on projects that included work in the digital security space, parallel architectures, auction software, and computing and networking support. In 1983, he was promoted to Department Head, a role he held until the end of his work at AT&T, even as the company was breaking itself up, and he ended up officially at AT&T Labs - Research. During his tenure in AT&T research and leadership roles, Odlyzko made a number of significant contributions to the fields of number theory – particularly in exploring issues related to the Riemann Hypothesis – , data security, and e-commerce. By 2001, he was also the holder of three U.S. Patents. Some of his best-known work – including an early debunking of the myth of Internet traffic doubling every three or four months and a demonstration that connectivity has traditionally mattered much more for society than content – came out of this era of his career. Amid the maelstrom that was the technology world in the late 1990s, AT&T Labs went through a series of breakups. In 2001, Odlyzko officially made his way to the University of Minnesota.
When he arrived at UMN, Odlyzko gained three new titles at once as he became the Director of the Digital Technology Center, Assistant Vice President for Research, and the ADC Telecommunications Chair Professor and Professor of Mathematics. As the Director of the Digital Technology Center, Andrew coordinated a variety of interdisciplinary research in a network of areas including bioinformatics and computational biology, graphics and visualization, information storage, networking, cryptography, and data mining. In the early 2000’s, Odlyzko published more than 20 papers exploring the growth of the Internet, telecommunications, and e-commerce.
While he is formally retired, Odlyzko continues an active research career, although one that has taken him away from mathematics:
“The backlog of my unfinished math problems is large enough that I expect I could spend the rest of my life working on it. (But that backlog is getting smaller even without any contributions from me, as others obtain results I was aiming for, and often go beyond, in the constant progress of mathematics.) However, what I am now devoting almost all my time and energy to are projects in economic history. It's another long story how I got into this area (one with several roots in math). The reason I am so involved in it is that I found a plethora of what we might call low-hanging fruit there, observations that go counter to current scholarly consensus, and which, if I ever succeed in persuading the world, would have major implications for economic policy going forward. It turns out that, contrary to the basic assumptions in economics of rationality and equilibrium, it is often the case that the dominant views ignore clear signs of impending danger, and of an inevitable "phase change." But I have to cope with the problem Kolmogorov faced: the difficulty in overcoming herd mentality, especially among scholars. Still, it is fun, discovering quantitative measures that very clearly disprove prevailing dogmas. And it is exciting to find in history observers who are now obscure or even completely forgotten, who have made some of those key quantitative observations in the past, observations that could have prevented economic disasters, and yet were ignored. So although most of my work may seem to be tilting at windmills, it is fun, and may yet have a serious impact.”
Odlyzko's ongoing research investigates the great British railway mania of the mid-nineteenth century and the South Sea Bubble of 1720, and draws comparisons to the Internet bubble of the late 1990s as well as the current cryptocurrency and AI bubbles. Adjusted for inflation, the British railway mania involved much larger investments than the Internet bubble. And, although it produced few bankruptcies, the losses were enormous. Furthermore, this work explores the implications for the future of technology diffusion. Given the nature of the printed and hand-written material about the railway mania, this project has led Odlyzko to do extensive library research around the world. He has recently produced several in-depth papers on this topic, and hopes to publish a book on this work.
Over the course of his career, Odlyzko’s work touched many corners of the academic world. He served on the editorial boards of over 20 technical journals, published more than 250 papers, and served as Vice President for the American Mathematical Society from 2012 to 2015. His work has been cited more than 200 times in mainstream media, including in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Economist, Popular Science, and Forbes. Odlyzko’s five decades of research and leadership at the intersection of technology, mathematics, and economics has left an unmistakable imprint on the mathematical community.