MATHEMATICIAN

Whitfield Diffie

1944 - Today

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Bailey Whitfield 'Whit' Diffie ForMemRS (born June 5, 1944) is an American cryptographer and mathematician and one of the pioneers of public-key cryptography along with Martin Hellman and Ralph Merkle. Diffie and Hellman's 1976 paper New Directions in Cryptography introduced a radically new method of distributing cryptographic keys, that helped solve key distribution—a fundamental problem in cryptography. Their technique became known as Diffie–Hellman key exchange. The article stimulated the almost immediate public development of a new class of encryption algorithms, the asymmetric key algorithms. Read more on Wikipedia

His biography is available in different languages on Wikipedia. Whitfield Diffie is the 485th most popular mathematician (down from 445th in 2019), the 4,046th most popular biography from United States (down from 3,637th in 2019) and the 30th most popular American Mathematician.

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Among MATHEMATICIANS

Among mathematicians, Whitfield Diffie ranks 485 out of 1,004Before him are Kurt Hensel, Philipp Frank, Yaʿqūb ibn Ṭāriq, Bruno Abakanowicz, James Waddell Alexander II, and Abu Mansur al-Baghdadi. After him are Guidobaldo del Monte, James Stirling, Albert Girard, Andrey Nikolayevich Tikhonov, Pierre Vernier, and Otto Hölder.

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Contemporaries

Among people born in 1944, Whitfield Diffie ranks 301Before him are Bo Larsson, Lars Norén, Geoffrey Hughes, Jacques-Alain Miller, Rebecca Horn, and Carlos Pachamé. After him are Wolfgang Weber, John McCook, Jiří Holeček, Boris Mikhailov, Tim Rice, and Jean-Louis Debré.

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In United States

Among people born in United States, Whitfield Diffie ranks 4,046 out of 20,380Before him are Jean Acker (1893), Carey Lowell (1961), Donn F. Eisele (1930), Sue Lyon (1946), Monte Melkonian (1957), and Joseph B. Foraker (1846). After him are John Powell (1947), Lawrence Eagleburger (1930), Gene Deitch (1924), Jesse Ventura (1951), Dan Castellaneta (1957), and Ada Blackjack (1898).

Among MATHEMATICIANS In United States

Among mathematicians born in United States, Whitfield Diffie ranks 30Before him are Marshall Harvey Stone (1903), Sal Khan (1976), Mitchell Feigenbaum (1944), William Thurston (1946), Sam Loyd (1841), and James Waddell Alexander II (1888). After him are Stephen Cole Kleene (1909), Richard Hamming (1915), Dennis Sullivan (1941), George David Birkhoff (1884), Julia Robinson (1919), and Richard E. Bellman (1920).