1. RSA Encryption System

2. RSA: History
In cryptography, RSA is an algorithm for public key encryption.
It was the first algorithm known to be suitable for signing as well as encryption, and one of the first great advances in public key cryptography.
RSA is still widely used in electronic commerce protocols, and is believed to be secure given sufficiently long keys.

3. RSA: History
The RSA algorithm was officially invented in 1977 by three research scientists working at MIT.
Dr. Ron Rivest, Dr. Adi Shamir, and Dr. Len Adleman.
The initials of their surnames compose the letters of RSA.

4. RSA: History
Unofficially an equivalent system was designed in 1973 at the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) in Britain.
Due to its top secret classification, details of the system were not revealed until 1997.

5. Dr. Ron Rivest
1969: Bachelors Degree in Mathematics from Yale University.
1974: Doctorate Degree in Computer Science from Stanford University.
He is most famously known for his work in the RSA algorithm, along with his creation of the symmetric key encryption algorithms (RC2, RC4, RC5, and RC6).
He was also the founder of RSA Data Security.

6. Dr. Ron Rivest
Dr. Rivest is currently working as a senior Professor of Computer Science in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT.

7. Dr. Adi Shamir
1973: Bachelors Degree in Mathematics from Tel-Aviv University.
1977: Doctorate Degrees in Computer Science from the Weizmann Institute.
Apart from the RSA algorithm, Dr. Shamir is well known for breaking the Merkle-Hellman cryptosystem and for his creation of the Shamir secret sharing scheme (cryptography).

8. Dr. Adi Shamir
Presently, Dr. Shamir is a faculty member of the Weizmann Institute in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science.

9. Dr. Len Adleman
1968: Bachelors Degree in Mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley.
1976: Doctorate Degree in Computer Science, from the same university.
In addition to his involvement in designing the RSA algorithm, Dr. Adleman is widely known for creating the initial field of DNA Computing at the University of Southern California (USC).

10. Dr. Len Adleman
DNA computing is a form of computing which uses DNA and molecular biology, instead of the traditional silicon-based computer technologies.
A single gram of DNA about the size of half inch cube can hold as much information as a trillion compact disks.
At the present time Dr. Adleman is working as a Professor of Computer Science and Molecular Biology at USC.

11. The Turing Award
In 2002 Dr. Rivest, Dr. Shamir, and Dr. Adleman received the ACM Turing Award, awarded on behalf of the Association of Computing Machinery in recognition of their discovery of the RSA encryption algorithm.
This award is commonly referred to as the Nobel Prize of Computer Science.