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MIT Crypto Experts Win 2012 Turing Award

Posted by Soulskill on from the congratulations-to-all dept.

alphadogg writes "A pair of MIT professors and security researchers whose work paved the way for modern cryptography have been named winners of the 2012 A.M. Turing Award, also known as the 'Nobel Prize in Computing.' Shafi Goldwasser, the RSA Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT and a professor at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, and Silvio Micali, the MIT Ford Professor of Engineering, are recipients of the award, which will be formally presented by the Association for Computing Machinery on June 15 in San Francisco. According to the ACM: 'By formalizing the concept that cryptographic security had to be computational rather than absolute, they created mathematical structures that turned cryptography from an art into a science.' Goldwasser and Micali will split a $250K prize."

14 of 32 comments (clear)

  1. Sponsorship by hawguy · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The RSA Professor of Electrical Engineering, the Ford Professor of Engineering. Do universities really need money so badly that they have to sell advertising in their faculty position names?

    1. Re:Sponsorship by hawguy · · Score: 1

      Seriously, did you ever sit down, multiply (tuition X students), and think about whether that yields enough money to run a university? If you think it does, you are so far off it isn't even funny.

      I went to a school that depends heavily on research grants, yet they haven't named a single professor after a corporation.

      It seems that it would get in the way of educational integrity..."Ford Professor of Electrical Engineering finds dangerous flaw in Chevy Volt, assures us that the Ford Ampere has no such problems, and our Energizer Professor of Batteries finds that the Duracell batteries used in the Chevy are substandard".

    2. Re:Sponsorship by rmdingler · · Score: 1

      Right..... Yet the friggin' USPS is going, going, gone legendarily broke with all that ad space on the side of how many million vehicles?

      --
      Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.

      Ernest Hemingway

    3. Re:Sponsorship by hawguy · · Score: 1

      While this is upsetting at least they haven't gotten to the point of having a Wal-Mart Oncology Department.

      It's going to be the Phillip-Morris Department of Oncology. And I hear they are going to discover that cigarettes don't cause cancer after all, it turns out that breathing is the problem.

    4. Re:Sponsorship by pjt33 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      You do realise that the practice of naming a chair after the sponsor goes back at least 400 years?

    5. Re:Sponsorship by sribe · · Score: 1

      The RSA Professor of Electrical Engineering, the Ford Professor of Engineering. Do universities really need money so badly that they have to sell advertising in their faculty position names?

      Uhm, endowed positions have been around at universities for, what, a few hundred years at least???

    6. Re:Sponsorship by Darinbob · · Score: 1

      Yes they do.

      Many of these named chairs aren't really advertisements but endowments. It's not like naming a building, in that you still have to name a worthy professor to grant the honor to, and the person making the endowment sometimes has no choice in which professor gets chosen. It would be wonderful if wealthy institutions could endow professorships while remaining anonymous, but that does not mean that non-anonymous stops being a gift and becomes an advert instead.

    7. Re:Sponsorship by Darinbob · · Score: 1

      These are all started as gifts. Big company gives university megabucks as a gift so that they can fund a professor that deals in an area of interest to the donor (ie, RSA funds cryptography type research). It's not advertisement because the goal is not to turn the students/faculty into customers, otherwise you'd be seeing plenty of endowed chairs at junior colleges.

    8. Re:Sponsorship by Darinbob · · Score: 1

      You think there is quid pro quo in the naming of these two professors?

    9. Re:Sponsorship by Russ1642 · · Score: 1

      Lots of crappy ideas go back that far.

  2. Paying 4 Sponsorship is even further out than that by girlinatrainingbra · · Score: 2
    There's also a Mitsubishi professor, and all other kinds of corporate sponsorships of "Endowed Chairs" at M.I.T. and other institutions (well endowed chairs =?= phallically-enhanced furniture ?). It's rather silly to see, but money talks. Even the Media Lab professors are all "titled chairs", e.g. : He is currently the Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Sciences, and Professor of electrical engineering and computer science.
    Isaac Asimov described Minsky as one of only two people he would admit were more intelligent than he was, the other being Carl Sagan.

    Over in merry olde Englande, that Hawkins guy is "Lucasian Professor of Physics", a title once held by Isaac Newton. So that seems more "honourable" (I bow to their excess vowel-inventory by including the extra british "u" in their spelling). It seems like corporations can publish advertising by "sponsoring endowed chairs", actually funding the construction of buildings, or paying enough to get their name on pre-existing buildings or departments.
    .
    Look at how David Geffen got his name on UCLA's theater department and theater across the way and medical center, and Ronald Reagan got his name on some of the clinical medical buildings at UCLA.
    .
    Captialism and selling out of already paid for buildings to tout fake sponsorship. MIT and Harvard have the two largest endowments of university systems in the USA, yet neither can resist the allure of extra funding when all they have to do is give up "naming rights" and alittle piece of their prestige and honor. Sic gloria transit mundi

  3. Re:Nonsense by cryptizard · · Score: 1

    What are you talking about?

  4. Obligatory /. pedantry by pjt33 · · Score: 1

    Hawking is a former Lucasian Professor of Mathematics. The chair is currently held by Michael Green.

    1. Re:Obligatory /. pedantry by girlinatrainingbra · · Score: 1

      Good grief, how did I get it so wrong!! Of course it should have been correct in the first place. I had been reading about the guy who did graffiti for the PalmPilot, so "Hawkins" with an "s" was in my mind, and the other part Physics/Math I screwed up. That he formerly held the chair was not even known by me. The other guys not quite as famous, eh? ;>)