Adi Shamir is best known for his work in cryptography, specifically the construction of the RSA public-key encryption system and the subsequent co founding of the RSA Group. Subsequent to this work Shamir has also produced a number of cryptographically important advances.

Adi Shamir was born in Tel Aviv, Israel, in 1952. After schooling in the local area he went to university at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovoth, Israel, where he studied mathematics. He was awarded his Ph.D. in 1977. Upon completion of his studies Shamir moved to the United States and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he worked in the Laboratory of Computer Science as an instructor. Here Shamir met Ronald L. Rivest and found one of his new tasks was to teach an advanced algorithm course--an area of which he only had a basic knowledge. Shamir obtained all of the library books on algorithms...