Leonard Adleman

Leonard Adleman was born on December 31, 1949, and grew up in San Francisco. He first got his Bachelor of Science at the University of California, Berkeley, in Mathematics. Then he later got his Ph.D. in computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. He took an assistant professorship at MIT and met Ron Rivest and Adi Shamir. Those 3 went on to make RSA Cryptography. RSA is an algorithm that encrypts data, allowing safe and secure communication on the internet. He is also known for his work in number theory, his primality tests, and algorithms for discrete logarithms. For this in 1995, he got the University of California, Berkeley, Department of Computer Science and Engineering Distinguished Alumnus Award. Leonard Adleman is also known as the father of DNA computing, which is computing using biological molecules and not silicon chips. He is currently studying DNA computing at USC.