Shamir, Adi

Adi Shamir, (born July 6, 1952, Tel Aviv, Israel), Israeli cryptographer and computer scientist and cowinner, with American computer scientists Leonard M. Adleman and Ronald L. Rivest, 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 patent rights to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Shamir received a bachelor’s degree (1973) in mathematics from Tel Aviv University and a master’s degree (1975) in computer science and a doctorate (1977) in computer science from the Weizmann Institute. After a year of postdoctoral work in England at the University of Warwick, Shamir pursued research at MIT (1977–80) before joining the Weizmann Institute (1980– ), where he was the Paul and Marlene Borman Professor of Applied Mathematics.

While at MIT, Shamir met Adleman and Rivest, 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.

Shamir holds more than a dozen patents related to cryptography and computer science. In addition to the Turing Award, Shamir, Adleman, and Rivest were awarded the 2000 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Koji Kobayashi Computers and Communications Award. Shamir’s other awards include the Israel Mathematical Union Erdős Prize in Mathematics (1983), the Association for Computing Machinery Paris Kannellakis Theory and Practice Award (1996), and the Israel Prize in Computer Science (2008). In 2017 he received the Japan Prize in the field of electronics, information, and technology.