Ralph Merkle

Ralph Merkle is an American computer scientist and mathematician, born February 2, 1952, in Berkeley, California, recognized as one of the inventors of public-key cryptography and the inventor of cryptographic hashing. His contributions include Merkle's Puzzles, an early public-key cryptography scheme, the Merkle-Hellman knapsack cryptosystem, the Merkle-Damgard construction underlying cryptographic hashing, Merkle trees, and the Khufu, Khafre and Snefru cryptographic algorithms. He earned a bachelor's and master's degree from UC Berkeley and a PhD from Stanford University under advisor Martin Hellman, with a dissertation on secrecy, authentication and public key systems. Merkle has held positions including compiler development manager at Elxsi, research scientist at Xerox PARC, nanotechnology theorist at Zyvex, and Distinguished Professor at Georgia Tech, and received the IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal in 2010 and the Paris Kanellakis Award in 1996.