Ron Rivest
Professor Ronald L. Rivest is a well known cryptographer. He was one of the inventors of the RSA algorithm. The 'R' in RSA stands for Rivest. He is also the inventor of the symmetric key encryption algorithms RC2, RC4, RC5, and co-inventor of RC6. The 'RC' stands for Rivest Cipher, alternately Ron's Code.
He earned a Bachelor's degree in Mathematics from Yale University in 1969, and a Ph.D in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1974.
He received the Turing Award in 2002.
He is currently professor of Computer Science at MIT. Professor Rivest is the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He is a member of MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science, a member of the lab's Theory of Computation Group and a founder of its Cryptography and Information Security Group. He is also a founder of RSA Data Security (now merged with Security Dynamics to form RSA Security) and of Peppercoin.
