Ron Rivest
Ronald Linn Rivest (/rɪˈvɛst/;[3][4] born May 6, 1947) is a cryptographer and computer scientist whose work has spanned the fields of algorithms and combinatorics, cryptography, machine learning, and election integrity. He is an Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT),[5] and a member of MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and its Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
"Rivest" redirects here. For other people with the same name, see Rivest (surname).
Ron Rivest
May 6, 1947
American
- Paris Kanellakis Award (1996)
- Turing Award (2002)
- Marconi Prize (2007)
- BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Awards (2017)
- National Inventors Hall of Fame (2018)
Along with Adi Shamir and Len Adleman, Rivest is one of the inventors of the RSA algorithm. He is also the inventor of the symmetric key encryption algorithms RC2, RC4, and RC5, and co-inventor of RC6. (RC stands for "Rivest Cipher".) He also devised the MD2, MD4, MD5 and MD6 cryptographic hash functions.
Education[edit]
Rivest earned a Bachelor's degree in mathematics from Yale University in 1969, and a Ph.D. degree in computer science from Stanford University in 1974 for research supervised by Robert W. Floyd.[1]
Career[edit]
At MIT, Rivest is a member of the Theory of Computation Group, and founder of MIT CSAIL's Cryptography and Information Security Group.
Rivest was a founder of RSA Data Security (now merged with Security Dynamics to form RSA Security), Verisign, and of Peppercoin.
His former doctoral students include Avrim Blum, Benny Chor, Sally Goldman, Burt Kaliski, Anna Lysyanskaya, Ron Pinter, Robert Schapire, Alan Sherman,[1]
and Mona Singh.[2]
Honors and awards[edit]
Rivest is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Sciences, and is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, the International Association for Cryptologic Research, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Together with Adi Shamir and Len Adleman, he has been awarded the 2000 IEEE Koji Kobayashi Computers and Communications Award and the Secure Computing Lifetime Achievement Award. He also shared with them the Turing Award. Rivest has received an honorary degree (the "laurea honoris causa") from the Sapienza University of Rome.[15] In 2005, he received the MITX Lifetime Achievement Award. Rivest was named in 2007 the Marconi Fellow, and on May 29, 2008, he also gave the Chesley lecture at Carleton College. He was named an Institute Professor at MIT in June 2015.[16]
Personal life[edit]
His son is Chris Rivest, entrepreneur and company co-founder.[17]