Martin Hellman

Received his Bachelor's degree from New York University in 1966, and his MS and Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1967 and 1969, all in electrical engineering. Hellman traces his interest in cryptography to three main influences: David Kahn's 1967 book The Codebreakers; his research at IBM (1968-69) in which he was a colleague of cryptographer Horst Feistel; and his 1970 exposure to Claude Shannon's classic 1949 paper A Mathematical Theory of Communication. After a two year stint as an Assistant Professor at MIT from 1969-71, he returned to Stanford where his interest in cryptography grew from an occasional interest to a full-time preoccupation. He did so inspite of warnings from his colleagues that the field was dominated by the the U.S. National Secutiry Agency, and would stay that way. While NSA's dominance would come to haunt his work, Hellman observes that, in hindsight, it was very wise to be so foolish. Hellman persisted and in 1976 published with Whitfield Diffie New Directions in Cryptography, a groundbreaking paper that introduced a radically new method of distributing cryptographic keys, enabling secure communications over an insecure channel without prearrangement of a secret key. While initially working independently of Ralph Merkle, whose cryptographic research started at Berkeley, their published system drew in part his work, and Merkle later became a Ph.D. candidate at Stanford working under Hellman's supervision. In the 1980s, Hellman worked with scientists in the Soviet Union to establish more open ties and to foster dialogue to reduce the threat posed by nuclear weapons. He has also worked to develop environments in which students of diverse backgrounds can function to the best of their ability within the university. Hellman became professor emeritus of electrical engineering in 1996.