Ronald L. Rivest is an Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he joined the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in 1974. He is a member of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and its Theory of Computation Group, and he founded CSAIL’s Cryptography and Information Security Group.
He is the “R” in RSA, the public-key cryptosystem he co-invented in 1977 with Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman. The trio’s paper, hosted on his MIT page, introduced the scheme that became one of the most widely used methods of public-key encryption and digital signatures.
Beyond RSA, Rivest is a co-author of the widely used textbook “Introduction to Algorithms” and a founder of RSA, Verisign, and Peppercoin. His MIT homepage describes his ongoing work across cryptography, security, and the theory of computation.
For the RSA work, Rivest shared the 2002 ACM Turing Award with Shamir and Adleman, the field’s highest honor.