Leonard Adleman

IRL Name:

Leonard Max Adleman

Biography:

Leonard Max Adleman is an American theoretical computer scientist who is one of the co-inventors of the RSA (Rivest–Shamir–Adleman) cryptosystem in 1977, and of DNA computing. RSA is in widespread use in security applications, including https. For his contribution to the invention of the RSA cryptosystem, Adleman, along with Ron Rivest and Adi Shamir, has been a recipient of the 1996 Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award and the 2002 ACM Turing Award, often called the Nobel Prize of Computer Science.

Facts

As a young boy growing up in San Francisco, Adleman had little ambition, far less of becoming a mathematician.

He is one of the original discoverers of the Adleman–Pomerance–Rumely primality test.

Fred Cohen, in his 1984 paper, Experiments with Computer Viruses has credited Adleman with coining the term "virus".

He is also widely referred to as the Father of DNA Computing.

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