Professor Adi Shamir, a computer scientist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, has been named a 2002 winner of the A.M. Turing Award, regarded in academic circles as the "Nobel Prize" of computer science. Shamir shares the award with Ronald L. Rivest of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Leonard M. Adleman of the University of Southern California. The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) will present the award to them in June.



While working at M.I.T. in 1977, the three scientists developed an algorithm that was later called RSA (the acronym for their last names). Used worldwide to secure Internet, banking and credit card transactions, the RSA algorithm allows for the delivery of encrypted codes and their decryption between parties that have never previously been in contact. The time needed to crack some versions of the method, which is based on the multiplication of two very large prime numbers and the difficulty in deducing those prime numbers from their product, is estimated at millions of years.



Shamir is now the third A.M. Turing Award recipient in Israel. In 1996, Professor Amir Pnueli, also a Weizmann Institute computer scientist, received the award for his contributions to program and systems verification. And Professor Michael Rabin of Hebrew University in Jerusalem received the award in 1976, for his research on nondeterministic machines.



The A.M. Turing Award has been presented annually since 1966 to individuals who have made contributions of "lasting and major technical importance" in the field of computer science.