Leonard Adleman

American computer scientist and mathematician, professor at USC. In the RSA collaboration his role was to attack Rivest's proposals; the system was considered finished only when he stopped succeeding. Turing Award 2002, shared with Rivest and Shamir.

In 1983 he suggested the word virus for the self-replicating programs his doctoral student Fred Cohen was experimenting with. In 1994 he encoded a seven-node Hamiltonian path problem in DNA strands and let the molecules find the solution by pairing up — the starting shot for DNA computing, a field that turned out to scale terribly but that redefined what a computer could be.