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Professor Ronald L. Rivest is a well known cryptographer, and is the Viterbi Professor of Computer Science at MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He is most celebrated for his work on Public-key encryption with Len Adleman and Adi Shamir, specifically the RSA algorithm, for which they won the 2002 ACM Turing Award.
He is also the inventor of the symmetric key encryption algorithms RC2, RC4, RC5, and co-inventor of RC6. The 'RC' stands for Rivest Cipher, alternately Ron's Code. He also authored the MD4 and MD5 hash algorithms.
He earned a Bachelor's degree in Mathematics from Yale University in 1969, and a Ph.D in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1974. He is a co-author of Introduction to Algorithms, a standard textbook on algorithms. He is a member of MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science, a member of the lab's Theory of Computation Group and a founder of its Cryptography and Information Security Group. He was also a founder of RSA Data Security (now merged with Security Dynamics to form RSA Security) and of Peppercoin.