Biography
Leonard Adleman (born December 31, 1945) is an American computer scientist. He is one of the creators of the RSA encryption algorithm, for which he received the 2002 Turing Award . [ 1 ] He is also known for the creation of the field of DNA computing and coining the term computer virus . [ 2 ] Leonard M. Adleman was born to a Jewish [ 3 ] family in California . His family had originally immigrated to the United States from modern-day Belarus , from the Minsk area. [ 3 ] He grew up in San Francisco and attended the University of California, Berkeley , where he received his B.A. degree in mathematics in 1968 and his Ph.D. degree in EECS in 1976. [ 1 ] [ 4 ] He was also the mathematical consultant on the movie Sneakers . [ 5 ] In 1996, he became a member of the National Academy of Engineering [ 6 ] for contributions to the theory of computation and cryptography. He is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences . [ 7 ] Adleman is also an amateur boxer and has sparred with James Toney . [ 8 ] Fields: Computer science, Cryptography Education: University of California, Berkeley BA MA PhD Award Citation: Turing Award (2002)
About the Turing Award
The ACM A.M. Turing Award is an annual prize given by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for contributions of lasting and major technical importance to computer science. It is generally recognized as the highest distinction in computer science and is colloquially known as the "Nobel Prize of Computing."
Quick Facts
- Award: ACM A.M. Turing Award
- Added: 2026-02-07
- Source: Wikipedia
- Prize: $1,000,000 (USD)
- Presented by: ACM
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Notable Winners
- Donald Knuth (1974)
- Tim Berners-Lee (2016)
- Geoffrey Hinton (2018)
- Yoshua Bengio (2018)
- Yann LeCun (2018)