Biography
Bailey Whitfield 'Whit' Diffie ForMemRS (born June 5, 1944) is an American cryptographer and mathematician and one of the pioneers of public-key cryptography along with Martin Hellman and Ralph Merkle . Diffie and Hellman's 1976 paper New Directions in Cryptography [ 5 ] introduced a radically new method of distributing cryptographic keys, that helped solve key distribution —a fundamental problem in cryptography. Their technique became known as Diffie–Hellman key exchange . The article stimulated the almost immediate public development of a new class of encryption algorithms, the asymmetric key algorithms . [ 6 ] After his career at Sun Microsystems , where he became a Sun Fellow , Diffie served for two and a half years as Vice President for Information Security and Cryptography at the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (2010–2012). He has also served as a visiting scholar (2009–2010) and affiliate (2010–2012) at the Freeman Spogli Institute's Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University , where he is currently a consulting scholar. [ 7 ] Diffie was born in Washington, D.C. His mother is Justine Louise (Whitfield), a writer and scholar. His father is Bailey Wallys Diffie , who taught Iberian history and culture at the City College of New York . [ 8 ] His interest in cryptography began at "age 10 when his father, a professor, brought home the entire crypto shelf of the City College Library in New York". [ 8 ] Fields: Cryptography Education: Massachusetts Institute of Technology BS Award Citation: .mw-parser-output .plainlist ol,.mw-parser-output .plainlist ul{line-height:inherit;list-style:none;margin:0;padding:0}.mw-parser-output .plainlist ol li,.mw-parser-output .plainlist ul li{margin-bottom:0} Kanellakis Award (1996) Marconi Prize (2000) IEEE Hamming Medal (2010) Computer History Museum Fellow (2011) [ 1 ] Turing Award (2015) ForMemRS (2015) [ 2 ]
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
Browse More
Notable Winners
- Donald Knuth (1974)
- Tim Berners-Lee (2016)
- Geoffrey Hinton (2018)
- Yoshua Bengio (2018)
- Yann LeCun (2018)