Martin Hellman

This article includes a list of references, related reading or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks inline citations. Please improve this article by introducing more precise citations where appropriate. (May 2009)

Martin Hellman

Martin Edward Hellman (born October 2, 1945) is a cryptologist, famous for his invention of public key cryptography in cooperation with Whitfield Diffie and Ralph Merkle.

Martin 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 also seems to have stimulated the almost immediate public development of a new class of encryption algorithms, the asymmetric key algorithms.

Hellman graduated from the Bronx High School of Science. He went on to earn his Bachelor's degree from New York University in 1966, and at Stanford University he earned a Master's degree in 1967 and a Ph.D. in 1969, all in electrical engineering.^[1]

From 1968–1969 he worked at IBM's Watson Research Center where he encountered Horst Feistel. From 1969–1971 he was an assistant professor at MIT. He joined Stanford in 1971 as a professor, serving until 1996 when he became Professor Emeritus.^[2] After retirement, he has focused on the probabilities and risks associated with nuclear weapons.

Martin and Whitfield 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.^[3]

References

1. ^ Martin Hellman's Stanford home page
2. ^ Martin Hellman's Stanford home page
3. ^ Columbia University press release regarding Marconi Fellowship

External links

• Martin Hellman's Stanford Webpage
• Martin Hellman's page of publications
• Oral history interview with Martin Hellman Oral history interview 2004, Palo Alto, California. Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. Hellman describes his invention of public key cryptography with collaborators Whitfield Diffie and Ralph Merkle at Stanford University in the mid-1970s. He also relates his subsequent work in cryptography with Steve Pohlig (the Pohlig-Hellman system) and others. Hellman addresses the National Security Agency’s (NSA) early efforts to contain and discourage academic work in the field, the Department of Commerce’s encryption export restrictions (under the International Traffic of Arms Regulation, or ITAR), and key escrow (the so-called Clipper chip). He also touches on the commercialization of cryptography with RSA Data Security and VeriSign.
• Martin Hellman's website on the risk of nuclear threat from nuclear war or nuclear terrorism
• "Defusing the nuclear threat and making the world safer" Announcement of Hellman presentation at U.C. Santa Cruz; Oct. 2008
• Hellman at the 2009 RSA conference, video with Hellman participating on the Cryptographer's Panel, April 21, 2009, Moscone Center, San Francisco
• Soaring, Cryptography and Nuclear Weapons

This article about a mathematician is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. v • d • e