# RSA Award for Excellence in Mathematics

The RSA Conference (RSAC) Award for Excellence in Mathematics is an annual award. It is announced at the annual RSA Conference in recognition of innovations and contributions in the field of cryptography. An award committee of experts, which is associated with the Cryptographer's Track committee at the RSA Conference (CT-RSA), nominates to the award persons who are pioneers in their field, and whose work has had applied or theoretical lasting value; the award is typically given for the lifetime achievements throughout the nominee's entire career. Nominees are often affiliated with universities or involved with research and development in the information technology industry. The award is cosponsored by the International Association for Cryptologic Research.
While the field of modern cryptography started to be an active research area in the 1970s, it has already contributed heavily to Information technology and has served as a critical component in advancing the world of computing: the Internet, Cellular networks, and Cloud computing, Information privacy, Privacy engineering, Anonymity, Storage security, and Information security, to mention just a few sectors and areas. Research in Cryptography as a scientific field involves the disciplines of Mathematics, Computer Science, and Engineering. The award, which started in 1998, is one of the few recognitions fully dedicated to acknowledging experts who have advanced the field of cryptography and its related areas (another such recognition is achieving the rank of an IACR Fellow).
The first recipient of the award in 1998 was Shafi Goldwasser. Also, many of the award winners have gotten other recognitions, such as other prestigious awards, and the rank of fellow in various professional societies, etc.
Research in Cryptography is broad and is dedicated to numerous areas. In fact, the award has, over the years, emphasized the methodological contributions to the field which involve mathematical research in various ways, and has recognized achievements in many of the following crucial areas of research:
* Some areas are in the general Computational number theory and Computational algebra fields, or in the fields of Information theory and Computational complexity theory, where proper mathematical structures are constructed or investigated as underlying mathematics to be employed in the field of cryptography;
* Some areas are theoretical in nature, where new notions for Cryptographic primitives are defined and their security is carefully formalized as foundations of the field, some work is influenced by Quantum computing as well;
* Some areas are dedicated to designing new or improved primitives from concrete or abstract mathematical mechanisms for Symmetric-key cryptography, Public-key cryptography, and Cryptographic protocols (such as Zero-knowledge proofs, Secure multi-party computations, or Threshold cryptosystems);
* Some other areas are dedicated to Cryptanalysis: the breaking of cryptographic systems and mechanisms;
* Yet some other areas are dedicated to the actual practice of cryptography and its efficient cryptographic hardware and software implementations, to developing and deploying new actual protocols (such as the Transport Layer Security and IPsec) to be used by information technology applications and systems. Also included are research areas where principles and basic methods are developed for achieving security and privacy in computing and communication systems.
To further read on various aspects of cryptography, from history to areas of modern research, see Books on cryptography.
In addition to the Award for Excellence in Mathematics which recognizes lifetime achievement in the specific area of Cryptographic research, the RSA conference has also presented a separate lifetime achievement awards in the more general field of information security. Past recipients of this award from the field of cryptography include:
* Taher Elgamal (2009),
* Whitfield Diffie (2010),
* Ronald Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman (2011), and
* Martin Hellman (2012)

## Past recipients

| Year | Recipient | Citation / Major Achievements |
| 1998 | Shafi Goldwasser | For pioneering theoretical foundations of modern cryptography. |
| 1999 | John Pollard | For major contributions to algebraic cryptanalysis of integer factorization and discrete logarithm. |
| 2000 | Ralph Merkle | For co-inventing public-key cryptography: the idea of key exchange and the Merkle's Puzzles. |
| 2001 | Scott Vanstone | For outstanding contributions to applied cryptography. |
| 2002 | Don Coppersmith | For exceptional contributions to symmetric and asymmetric Cryptanalysis. |
| 2003 | Mihir Bellare and Phillip Rogaway | For major contributions to practice oriented secure cryptography. |
| 2004 | Silvio Micali | For pioneering theoretical foundations of modern cryptography. |
| 2005 | Dan Boneh | For innovative designs of cryptographic primitives. |
| 2006 | Oded Goldreich | For basic contributions to the foundations of cryptography. |
| 2007 | Jacques Stern | For contributions to mathematical techniques underlying proofs of cryptographic protocols and cryptanalysis. |
| 2008 | Arjen Lenstra | For contributions to computational number theory, including to integer factorization. |
| 2009 | Neal Koblitz and Victor Miller | For inventing elliptic-curve cryptography. |
| 2010 | David Chaum | For innovating cryptographic anonymity primitives. |
| 2011 | Charles Rackoff | For computational complexity oriented cryptography, including co-inventing zero-knowledge proofs. |
| 2012 | Eli Biham | For symmetric key cryptanalysis, in particular for co-inventing differential cryptanalysis. |
| 2012 | Mitsuru Matsui | For symmetric key cryptanalysis, in particular for inventing linear cryptanalysis. |
| 2013 | Jean-Jacques Quisquater | For contributions to cryptographic engineering: hardware, standards, and practical zero-knowledge authentication. |
| 2013 | Claus P. Schnorr | For contributions to hardware oriented efficient practical zero-knowledge authentication and signatures. |
| 2014 | Bart Preneel | For contributions to applied cryptography and to the cryptanalysis and design of cryptographic hash functions. |
| 2015 | Ivan Damgård | For contributions to cryptographic hashing principles and to cryptographic protocols. |
| 2015 | Hugo Krawczyk | For contributions to hashing based message authentication codes and to applied key-agreement protocols. |
| 2016 | Ueli Maurer | For contributions to Information-theoretic Cryptography and to analysis of cryptographic schemes. |
| 2017 | Tatsuaki Okamoto | For contributions to numerous primitives and protocols within public-key cryptography. |
| 2018 | Ran Canetti | For contributions to the foundations of secure multi-party computation. |
| 2018 | Rafail Ostrovsky | For contributions to the theory and to new variants of secure multi-party computations. |
| 2019 | Tal Rabin | For contributions to distributed cryptographic protocols: Multi-Party Computations, threshold cryptography, and signature schemes. |
| 2020 | Joan Daemen and Vincent Rijmen | For major contributions to symmetric key cryptography, including the development of the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES)]. |
| 2021 | David Pointcheval | For developing Provable security arguments for applied Public-key cryptographic systems and protocols. |
| 2022 | Cynthia Dwork and Moni Naor | For contributions to the foundation of privacy and to the foundations of cryptography. |
| 2023 | Paul Carl Kocher | For pioneering contributions to cryptographic hardware, and side channel attacks in particular. |
| 2024 | Craig Gentry and Oded Regev | For major contributions to Lattice-Based Cryptographic Encryption, especially for the highly utilized `Learning with Error’ based cryptosystem, and the first ‘Fully Homomorphic Encryption’ cryptosystem |