Adi Shamir

Israeli cryptographer, professor at the Weizmann Institute. Besides RSA he is behind Shamir's Secret Sharing (1979), where a secret is split into n shares of which any k reconstruct it — and k−1 reveal nothing whatsoever. The construction rests on the fact that a polynomial of degree k−1 is uniquely determined by k points.

In 1982 he broke the Merkle–Hellman knapsack cryptosystem. With Eli Biham he developed differential cryptanalysis, published in 1990 — after which it emerged that IBM and the NSA had known about the technique back when DES was designed in the 1970s, and had kept quiet.