Don Coppersmith

Biography

One of the world’s leading researchers in cryptography, Don Coppersmith was part of the IBM team that developed the Data Encryption Standard (DES). Used in financial and Internet applications since 1977, DES is an established U.S. government standard for commercial encryption. Currently, Dr. Coppersmith is a research staff member at the Center for Communications Research (CCR), Institute for Defense Analyses, Princeton, N.J. His work with Shmuel Winograd on the complexity of matrix multiplication pushed the boundaries of computational complexity theory and has gained much renown. One of his most significant breakthroughs in cryptanalysis was his ultra-fast algorithm for discrete logarithms. An IEEE Fellow, Coppersmith is a four-time winner of the William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition, and past recipient of an IBM Outstanding Innovation Award. He has authored and co-authored more than 100 technical papers and holds a master’s degree and doctorate in mathematics from Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.