Adleman, Leonard M.

Leonard M. Adleman, (born Dec. 31, 1945, San Francisco, Calif., U.S.), American computer scientist and cowinner, with American computer scientist Ronald L. Rivest and Israeli cryptographer Adi Shamir, of the 2002 A.M. Turing Award, the highest honour in computer science, for their “ingenious contribution for making public-key cryptography useful in practice.” The three scientists patented their “Cryptographic Communication System and Method,” commonly known as RSA encryption, and assigned the patent rights to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Adleman received a bachelor’s degree (1968) in mathematics and a doctorate (1976) in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley, where his thesis adviser was Manuel Blum (the 1995 Turing Award winner). After leaving Berkeley, Adleman taught in the mathematics department at MIT (1976–80) and then in the computer science department at the University of Southern California (1980– ), where he is the Henry Salvatori Professor (1985– ) and a Distinguished Professor (2000– ).

While at MIT, Adleman met Rivest and Shamir, and in 1977 they produced the first public-key encryption system using digital signatures. Their data-encryption scheme relied on the enormous difficulty of factoring the product of two very large prime numbers, which form a cryptographic key. In 1983 they founded RSA Data Security to pursue commercial applications, which led to the creation of VeriSign, a widely used digital certification system on the Internet. Millions of people use RSA encryption to secure e-mail and other digital transactions.

Adleman’s 1994 paper “Molecular Computation of Solutions to Combinatorial Problems” described the first successful example of DNA computing, in which he used DNA to solve a simple problem in graph theory involving a seven-node Hamiltonian circuit, an NP-complete problem (i.e., a problem for which no efficient solution algorithm is known) similar to the traveling salesman problem. Adleman has been credited with having first used the word virus to describe malicious software (malware). Adleman was the mathematical consultant on the American film Sneakers (1992), which dealt with computers and cryptography.

In 1996 Adleman was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Engineering. In addition to the Turing Award, Adleman received the Association for Computing Machinery Paris Kanallakis Award for Theory and Practice (1996) and, together with Rivest and Shamir, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Kobayashi Award for Computers and Communications (2000).