Leonard Adleman
The A in RSA
RSA, and naming the computer virus
Rating
92Impact score
Domains
Public-key cryptographyComplexity theoryDNA computing
Scouting report
The third name on the RSA paper, whose role was to keep breaking the schemes Rivest and Shamir proposed until one survived. Later coined the term “computer virus” for Fred Cohen’s 1983 experiments, and founded DNA computing with a molecular solution to the Hamiltonian path problem. Turing Award, 2002.
Curator’s note
The designated attacker on the RSA team. The set needs more of those.
Portrait
Painted from a photograph of Leonard Adleman by len adlmen, licensed CC BY-SA 3.0.
Sources
- 01Leonard Adleman en.wikipedia.org
- 02ACM A.M. Turing Award 2002 amturing.acm.org