Adi Shamir is an Israeli cryptographer and a Full Professor (Emeritus) in the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science at the Weizmann Institute of Science, in the Department of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics. He is regarded as one of the founders of modern cryptography.
He is the “S” in RSA, the public-key cryptosystem he co-invented in 1977 with Ronald Rivest and Leonard Adleman while at MIT. Their joint paper introduced the scheme that became the most widely used public-key encryption and signature method.
Shamir’s contributions extend well beyond RSA. His Weizmann research profile and other records of his work credit him with pioneering secret sharing schemes, identity-based cryptography, zero-knowledge identification and signature schemes, ring signatures, and cryptanalytic techniques including differential cryptanalysis.
For the RSA work, Shamir shared the 2002 ACM Turing Award with Rivest and Adleman.