Adi Shamir (Hebrew: עדי שמיר; born July 6, 1952) is an Israeli cryptographer and inventor. He helped create the Rivest–Shamir–Adleman (RSA) algorithm with Ron Rivest and Len Adleman. He also helped create the Feige–Fiat–Shamir identification scheme with Uriel Feige and Amos Fiat. He was one of the first people to develop differential cryptanalysis. He has made many important contributions to cryptography and computer science. In 2002, Ron Rivest, Len Adleman, and Adi Shamir won the ACM Turing Award.
Biography
Adi Shamir was born in Tel Aviv. He earned a Bachelor's degree in mathematics from Tel Aviv University in 1973. He later received a Master's degree and a Doctorate in computer science from the Weizmann Institute in 1975 and 1977, respectively. From 1977 to 1980, he worked as a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and spent one year as a researcher at the University of Warwick.
Scientific career
In 1980, he returned to Israel and became part of the Mathematics and Computer Science faculty at the Weizmann Institute. In 2006, he was invited to teach at École Normale Supérieure in Paris.
In addition to RSA, Shamir's other contributions to cryptography include the Shamir secret sharing scheme, breaking the Merkle-Hellman knapsack cryptosystem, visual cryptography, and the TWIRL and TWINKLE factoring devices. In the late 1980s, he and Eli Biham discovered differential cryptanalysis, a method for breaking block ciphers. Later, it was found that IBM and the National Security Agency (NSA) had already known about this method and kept it secret.
Shamir has also contributed to computer science beyond cryptography, such as developing the first linear time algorithm for solving 2-satisfiability and proving that the complexity classes PSPACE and IP are equivalent.
Awards and recognition
- Received the 2002 ACM Turing Award along with Rivest and Adleman for his work in cryptography
- Won the Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award
- Received the Erdős Prize from the Israel Mathematical Society
- Earned the 1986 IEEE W.R.G. Baker Award
- Received the UAP Scientific Prize
- Awarded the Vatican Pius XI Gold Medal
- Received the 2000 IEEE Koji Kobayashi Computers and Communications Award
- Won the Israel Prize in 2008 for contributions to computer sciences
- Received an Honorary Doctor of Mathematics degree from the University of Waterloo
- Received the 2017 Japan Prize in Electronics, Information and Communication for pioneering research in cryptography and information security
- Became a Foreign Member of the Royal Society in 2018 for significant contributions to scientific knowledge
- Elected as a Member of the American Philosophical Society in 2019
- Received the 2024 Wolf Prize in Mathematics for foundational work in Mathematical Cryptography
- Won the 2025 Levchin Prize for contributions to Real World Cryptography