Ronald L Rivest

Professor Rivest is an Institute Professor at MIT. He joined MIT in 1974 as a faculty member in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He is a member of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), a member of the lab's Theory of Computation Group and a founder of its Cryptography and Information Security Group. He is a co-author (with Cormen, Leiserson, and Stein) of the text, Introduction to Algorithms. He is also a founder of RSA Data Security, now named RSA Security (the security division of EMC), Versign, and Peppercoin. Professor Rivest has research interests in cryptography, computer and network security, electronic voting, and algorithms. Professor Rivest grew up in Niskayuna, New York, where he attend public schools. He graduated from Niskayuna High School in 1965. Professor Rivest received a B.A. in Mathematics from Yale University in 1969. He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1974; his research supervisor was Professor Robert Floyd. He also worked closely with Professor Donald Knuth, David Klarner, and Vasek Chvatal. He was a post-doc at INRIA in Rocquencourt, France for the academic year 1973-74.