Leonard Adleman

Leonard Max Adleman (born December 31, 1945) is an American computer scientist, professor, and Turing Award laureate best known for co-inventing the RSA public-key cryptosystem and pioneering the field of DNA computing.

Adleman earned a B.A. in mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1968 and a Ph.D. in computer science from the same institution in 1976. After serving as an assistant and associate professor at MIT from 1977 to 1980, he joined the University of Southern California (USC) in 1980, where he holds the Henry Salvatori Chair in Computer Science and serves as a distinguished professor of computer science, with a courtesy appointment in molecular biology.

Leonard Adleman was born on December 31, 1945, in San Francisco, California, to a Jewish family. His paternal grandfather, born in the Minsk area of what is now Belarus, immigrated to the United States in the 1890s as part of a wave of Jewish migration fleeing persecution. Adleman's mother, born in 1919 in San Francisco and raised as an orphan in foster homes and institutions, reflecting the challenges faced by many immigrant families in establishing roots. This heritage of immigration from Belarus contributed to a family environment emphasizing resilience and adaptation, shaped by the economic hardships of the Great Depression that his parents endured.