World-leaders in Cryptography: Neal Koblitz
Neal I. Koblitz is a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Washington. He is a co-inventor of Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC). His original paper was published in 1987 and entitled "Elliptic curve cryptosystems" [1]. Overall, ECC is one of the greatest breakthroughs in cryptography and which has largely replaced discrete logarithm methods in key exchange and has replaced the RSA method in many applications for digital signing. Overall, elliptic curve methods are now used extensively with digital signing (ECDSA/EdDSA) and for key exchange (ECDH), along with applications into Bitcoin and Ethereum. Neal was recently recognized for his work with the Levchin Prize at the real-world cryptography conference. His recent work has included applications for lattice cryptography and random oracles. Neal is also the author of several leading textbooks: [1] Koblitz, N. (1994). A course in number theory and cryptography (Vol. 114). Springer Science & Business Media.