Richard Peirce Brent is an Australian mathematician and computer scientist. He is an emeritus professor at the Australian National University. From March 2005 to March 2010 he was a Federation Fellow at the Australian National University. His research interests include number theory (in particular factorisation), random number generators, computer architecture, and analysis of algorithms. In 1973, he published a root-finding algorithm (an algorithm for solving equations numerically) which is now known as Brent's method. In 1975 he and Eugene Salamin independently conceived the Salamin–Brent algorithm, used in high-precision calculation of π{\displaystyle \pi }. At the same time, he showed that all the elementary functions (such as log(x), sin(x) etc.) can be evaluated to high precision in the same time as π{\displaystyle \pi } (apart from a small constant factor) using the arithmetic-geometric mean of Carl Friedrich Gauss. In 1979 he showed that the first 75 million complex zeros of th