Ronald Rivest is best known for his work in cryptography (the RSA public key encryption system) and his co-founding of the RSA Data Security Group.

Ronald Linn Rivest was born in Schenectady, New York, in 1947. After growing up in the area Rivest started his university career at Yale. Rivest received a B.A. in mathematics in 1969, and in 1974 he received his Ph.D. from Stanford University, the latter in computer science. In 1974 Rivest was taken on at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as an assistant professor in the electronic engineering and computer science department. In 1976, while working with Adi Shamir, the pair came up with a system of encrypting data. To test the system they brought in Leonard Adleman. On Adleman's 43rd attempt to crack the code they realized they had found a system with the desired level of security. The algorithm was patented and the system...