MIT Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science

Shafi Goldwasser Named RSA Professor

To: EECS Faculty

From: Paul Penfield, Jr.

Date: May 19, 1997

Subject: Shafi Goldwasser Named RSA Professor

I am pleased to tell you that Prof. Shafrira Goldwasser has been selected as the first holder of the new RSA Professorship. Her appointment is effective May 1, 1997.

Shafi received her Ph.D. from Berkeley, and joined our faculty in 1983. She is recognized as a world leader in complexity theory, number theory, and cryptography. She has made numerous deep and important contributions to these areas, and is particularly noted for her pioneering work, with Prof. Silvio Micali and Prof. Charles Rackoff from Toronto, on interactive and zero-knowledge proofs. Her recent research results include a demonstration that certain computational problems are inherently difficult even if the task is only to approximate the desired answer.

In 1993 she (with Prof. Micali and others) won the first Gödel Prize, which is considered to be the most prestigious award in the field of theoretical computer science. Then within the past year she was awarded the Grace Murray Hopper Award, which goes to "the outstanding young computer professional of the year . . . selected on the basis of a single recent major technical or service accomplishment."

The RSA Professorship was established in 1997 with part of the proceeds from the licensing agreement between MIT and RSA Data Security, Inc. This company was founded to exploit the public-key RSA encryption technique, which is based on the presumed difficulty of factoring large non-prime integers, and was originally conceived and developed at MIT by Ronald Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman.

The leadership of the company is enthusiastic about the selection of Prof. Goldwasser as the first chairholder. "We are delighted to have made the RSA Chair possible at MIT," said Jim Bidzos, CEO. "We congratulate Prof. Goldwasser, who is and has been one of the most important contributors to the field of cryptography."