Don Coppersmith

Don Coppersmith (born circa 1950) is a cryptographer and mathematician who was involved in the design of the Data Encryption Standard block cipher at IBM, particularly the design of the S-boxes, strengthening them against differential cryptanalysis. He also improved the quantum Fourier transform discovered by Peter Shor in 1994, and has worked on algorithms for computing discrete logarithms, the cryptanalysis of RSA, rapid matrix multiplication, via the Coppersmith-Winograd algorithm, and IBM's MARS cipher, of which he is a co-designer along with the SEAL and Scream ciphers. He obtained a bachelor's degree in mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1972 and a master's and PhD in mathematics from Harvard University in 1975 and 1977, and was a Putnam Fellow every year from 1968 to 1971, becoming the first four-time Putnam Fellow in history. In 2002 he won the RSA Award for Excellence in Mathematics, and in 2022 he was awarded the Levchin Prize for foundational innovations in cryptanalysis.