Leonard Max Adleman

Leonard M. Adleman is the Henry Salvatori Distinguished Professor of Computer Science and Professor of Molecular Biology at the University of Southern California. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and National Academy of Engineering. He has conducted research on the problem of primality testing and has exhibited a fast algorithm to distinguish prime numbers from composite numbers. Adleman is known for co-inventing the RSA (Rivest-Shamir-Adleman) cryptosystem in 1977, as well as DNA computing. RSA is in widespread use in security applications, including https. This public key cryptosystem attracted the interest of the National Secuity Agency, which at first feared that the publication of seemingly unbreakable codes like RSA might potentially jeopardise national security. In 1983 Adleman and colleagues formed a company, RSA Data Security Inc., to make RSA computer chips. Adleman was made president, Rivest chairman of the board, and Shamir the treasurer. In 1996, the company was sold for $200 million. Fred Cohen has attributed the invention of the term "computer virus" to Adleman. In 1994, Adleman's paper Molecular Computation of Solutions to Combinatorial Problems described the experimental use of DNA as a computational system, the first known instance of the successful use of DNA to compute an algorithm. Adleman is widely referred to as the Father of DNA Computing. For his contribution to the invention of the RSA cryptosystem, Adleman, along with Ron Rivest and Adi Shamir, received the 1996 Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award and the 2002 ACM Turing Award, often called the Nobel Prize of Computer Science.