Cryptographers Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman, who created the famous Diffie-Helman protocol for public-key cryptography, 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 Prize 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 hardware, software, or was entirely theoretical.
Previous winners of the Turing Award include: 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 for 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 on its website today, the ACM says 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.
The ACM announced that the two scientists won the award (and the prize) for their groundbreaking study “New Directions in Cryptography,” which laid the foundation for public key exchange, which is used for all encrypted communications.
In addition to the public recognition, the award also comes with a cash prize. The winners were made richer by one million dollars. Most of the money comes from Google, which announced in November 2014 that it would be the sponsor of the award.
The ACM awards ceremony will take place on June 11, 2016 in San Francisco.
