1. Bailey Whitfield 'Whit' Diffie ForMemRS was born on June 5,1944 and is an American cryptographer and mathematician and one of the pioneers of public-key cryptography along with Martin Hellman and Ralph Merkle.
15 Facts About Whitfield Diffie
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Whitfield Diffie has served as a visiting scholar and affiliate at the Freeman Spogli Institute's Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University, where he is currently a consulting scholar.
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Whitfield Diffie's mother is Justine Louise, a writer and scholar.
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Whitfield Diffie's father is Bailey Wallys Diffie, who taught Iberian history and culture at the City College of New York.
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At Jamaica High School in Queens, New York, Whitfield Diffie "performed competently" but "never did apply himself to the degree his father hoped".
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Whitfield Diffie received a Bachelor of Science with a major in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1965.
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In November 1969, Whitfield Diffie became a research programmer at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, where he worked on LISP 1.6 and correctness problems while cultivating interests in cryptography and computer security under the aegis of John McCarthy.
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Whitfield Diffie left SAIL to pursue independent research in cryptography in May 1973.
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Whitfield Diffie remained with Sun, serving as its chief security officer and as a vice president until November 2009.
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In May 2010, Whitfield Diffie joined the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers as vice president for information security and cryptography, a position he left in October 2012.
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Whitfield Diffie is a member of the technical advisory boards of BlackRidge Technology, and Cryptomathic where he collaborates with researchers such as Vincent Rijmen, Ivan Damgard and Peter Landrock.
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Together with Martin Hellman, Whitfield Diffie won the 2015 Turing Award, widely considered the most prestigious award in the field of computer science.
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Whitfield Diffie received an honorary doctorate from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in 1992.
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Whitfield Diffie is a fellow of the Marconi Foundation and visiting fellow of the Isaac Newton Institute.
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Whitfield Diffie was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2017 for the invention of public key cryptography and for broader contributions to privacy.