Leonard Adleman
loreThe A in RSA and joint recipient of the 2002 Turing Award, later the founder of DNA computing.
His role in the trio was largely to attack the constructions the other two proposed, which is how the surviving one earned confidence: the published algorithm is the one that outlasted its own co-author trying to break it. That division of labour - propose, attack, keep what survives - is the method the whole field runs on, and it is easier to describe than to practise inside a group of three people who have to agree on a paper afterwards.
Also known as: adleman
Sources
- ACM A.M. Turing Award - Ronald Rivest, laureate page
- Rivest, Shamir and Adleman, 'A Method for Obtaining Digital Signatures and Public-Key Cryptosystems', from Rivest's own MIT page; received 4 April 1977 and revised 1 September 1977, with publication in Communications of the ACM following in February 1978