Ralph Merkle
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Ralph C. Merkle (born 2 February 1952) is a pioneer in public key cryptography, and more recently a researcher and speaker on molecular nanotechnology and cryonics.
Merkle graduated from Livermore High School in 1970 and proceeded to study Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley, obtaining his B.A. in 1974, and his M.S. in 1977. In 1979 he was awarded a PhD in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University with a thesis titled Secrecy, authentication and public key systems. Currently, he is a distinguished professor at College of Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology
In industry, he was the manager of compiler development at Elxsi from 1980. In 1988, he became a research scientist at Xerox PARC, until 1999. Subsequently he worked as a nanotechnology theorist for Zyvex, returning to academia in 2003 as a distinguished professor at Georgia Tech.
Ralph Merkle is the great grandnephew of baseball star Fred Merkle (see History of baseball.)
Merkle devised an early scheme for communication over an insecure channel: Merkle's Puzzles. He also coinvented the Merkle-Hellman public key cryptosystem, and invented Merkle trees. While at Xerox PARC, Merkle designed the Khufu and Khafre block ciphers, and the Snefru hash function.
Whitfield Diffie has described Merkle as "possibly the single most inventive character in the public-key saga."
In addition to his work at Georgia Tech, Merkle is also a director of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation.
Merkle appears in the fiction book The Diamond Age as one of the heroes of the world where nanotechnology is ubiquitous.
[edit] Bibliography
- Ralph C. Merkle Secrecy, authentication, and public key systems (Computer science) (UMI Research Press, 1982) ISBN 0-8357-1384-9
- Robert A. Freitas, Ralph C. Merkle, Kinematic Self-Replicating Machines (Landes Bioscience, 2004) ISBN 1-57059-690-5
- Paul Kantor (Ed), Gheorghe Mureşan (Ed), Fred Roberts (Ed), Daniel Zeng (Ed), Frei-Yue Wang (Ed), Hsinchun Chen (Ed), Ralph Merkle (Ed) Intelligence and Security Informatics : IEEE International Conference on Intelligence and Security Informatics, ISI 2005, Atlanta, GA, USA, May 19-20, ... (Lecture Notes in Computer Science) (Springer, 2005) ISBN 3-540-25999-6
[edit] See also
- K. Eric Drexler
- Robert Freitas
- Richard Feynman
- Merkle-Damgård construction - A method designed by Merkle and Damgård. Used within most modern cryptographic hash functions such as SHA-1 and MD5.
[edit] External links
- Ralph Merkle's personal website
- Merkle's Ph.D. thesis
- The First Ten Years of Public-Key Cryptography Whitfield Diffie, Proceedings of the IEEE, vol. 76, no. 5, May 1988, pp: 560-577 (1.9MB PDF file)
- Who's Who in the Nanospace
