Leonard Adleman

Leonard Max Adleman is an American computer scientist and professor at the University of Southern California who earned his PhD in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of California, Berkeley in 1976 under Manuel Blum, and who is best known as one of the three creators of the RSA public-key encryption algorithm, developed with Ronald Rivest and Adi Shamir. Beyond cryptography, Adleman founded the field of DNA computing, demonstrating in the 1990s that strands of DNA could be used to solve a computational problem, encoding possible solutions in DNA molecules and using laboratory biochemical techniques to filter for the correct answer. He is also credited with coining the term computer virus to describe self-replicating malicious software, terminology that remains standard in computer security. Adleman shared the ACM Turing Award in 2002 with Rivest and Shamir for the invention of the RSA cryptosystem, and he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1996 and the National Academy of Sciences.