Whitfield Diffie is best known for his discovery of the concept of public key cryptography (with Martin Hellman).

Whitfield Diffie was born in Queens, New York, in 1944, where he went to school. Diffie did not start reading until he was 10 years old but made up for his late start by reading everything he could. After one of his primary school teachers spent an afternoon looking at codes and ciphers Diffie made his father, a lecturer in history at City College, New York, check out all of the cryptography books in the college library. This interest did not last, though, and he soon drifted into castles, camouflage, rockets, and poison gases as his main areas of focus (at one time he thought of a military career). During high school his main interest changed again, this time to mathematics, and in 1965 Diffie was awarded a B.S. in mathematics from...