The Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman cryptographers, who created the famous Diffie-Helman protocol for the exchange of the public key encryption, are this year's winners of the Turing Award. The Turing Award is considered the Oscar of Computer Science and Technology.
Its distribution began in 1966. The Turing Award is an annual award given by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), an international community for computing.
Like the Nobel Prize, the Turing Award is given annually to scientists who have contributed to the field of computer science, regardless of whether their innovation involved material, software, or was it completely theoretical.
Previous winners of the Turing Award have been: Marvin Minsky (the father of Artificial Intelligence), Edsger W. Dijkstra (creator of ALGOL, one of the first high-level programming languages), Alan Kay (for his pioneering ideas on object-oriented programming languages), Vinton G. Cerf and Robert E. Kahn (creators of the TCP/IP protocols), and Charles P. Thacker (the man behind the Xerox Alto, the first modern PC).
In a statement to by clicking here of today, ACM reports that this year's Turing Award recipients are Whitfield Diffie, the former Chief Security Officer of Sun Microsystems, and Martin Hellman, Professor Emeritus of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University.
ACM announced that the two scientists won the award (and the prize) for their groundbreaking study "New Directions in Cryptography," which laid the groundwork for the exchange of public keys, used for all encrypted communications.
In addition to the public distinction, the prize also comes with a cash prize. The winners were richer by one million dollars. Most of the money comes from Google, which announced in November of 2014 that it will be the sponsor of the prize.
The award from ACM will take place on June 11 of 2016 in San Francisco.
