- 2015 Turing Award
Intro
2015 Turing Award
American cryptologist. In 2015, he was awarded Turing Award with Whitfield Diffie for inventing and promulgating both asymmetric public-key cryptography, including its application to digital signatures, and a practical cryptographic key-exchange method.
Education and Work Experience
1979-Present, Professor of Electrical Engineering (1996-Present, Professor Emeritus), Stanford University
2011-Present, Member of Nuclear Security Advisory Board
2015-Present, Board of Experts, Federation of American Scientists
2017-Present, Member of the Scientific Advisory Board, the “Nuclear Knowledges” Program at Sciences Po, France’s top political science institution
Honors and Awards
1984, IEEE Centennial Medal
2011, United States National Inventors Hall of Fame
2013, Silicon Valley Hall of Fame
2015, Turing Award
Major Academic Achievements
Prof. Hellman and Whitfield Diffie's paper New Directions in Cryptography was published in 1976. It introduced a radically new method of distributing cryptographic keys, which went far toward solving one of the fundamental problems of cryptography, key distribution. It has become known as Diffie-Hellman key exchange. The article stimulated the development of a new class of encryption algorithms, known variously as public key encryption and asymmetric encryption. Hellman and Diffie were awarded the Marconi Fellowship and accompanying prize in 2000 for work on public-key cryptography and for helping make cryptography a legitimate area of academic research,and they were awardede the 2015 Turing Award for the same work.