Cliff Stoll

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Math ain't about numbers! If you think that math is all about numbers, you probably think that Shakespeare is all about words.
—Clifford Stoll, Numberphile - Klein Bottles

Cliff Stoll is well know by his top quality, low volume Klein Bottles prominently displayed on the set of The Portal. Cliff's company, Acme Klein Bottles, supplies world-class blown glass Klein Bottles to many. It is purportedly operated from a crawlspace underneath his own home with the aid of some kind of robotic forklift.

Clifford Stoll is an astronomer, author, teacher, and computing legend who attained his PhD in Astronomy from the University of Arizona in 1980. As written in his 1989 book, "The Cuckoo's Egg", once the grant money employing Cliff designing telescope optics for the Keck Observatory dried up, Cliff would find himself saved from the unemployment office, recycled into a computer systems administrator at the computing department of the Lawrence Berkeley Lab. After encountering a $0.75 accounting error in the timesharing VAX computer system, he would nearly single-handedly unravel the case of the "Hanover Hacker", implicating Markus Hess, an alleged KGB agent who would be known as the world's first documented computer hacker. Markus Hess would be convicted of these crimes in 1990.

Papers

Polarimetry of Jupiter at Large Phase Angles Communications of the ACM

Appearances

Cliff has been known to appear on Numberphile The Cuckoo's Egg has been re-enacted by Cliff and others involved on the public broadcast television program NOVA, which is available on youtube. Cliff occasionally continues to speak about his historic influence on the field of computer forensics at SANS and many other institutions.