Stuart Haber

Stuart Haber is an American cryptographer and computer scientist, known for his contributions in cryptography and privacy-preserving technologies and widely recognized as the co-inventor of the blockchain. His 1991 paper "How to Time-Stamp a Digital Document”, co-authored with W. Scott Stornetta, won the 1992 Discover Award for Computer Software and is considered to be one of the most important papers in the development of cryptocurrencies.
Haber is still involved in the development of blockchain technology to this day, forming the eponymous Stuart Haber Crypto, LLC in 2017, which provides consultancy services in cryptography and blockchain technology, and performing a TEDx talk in 2019 about the evolution of blockchain technology.
== Education ==
As an undergraduate Haber studied at Harvard University, graduating Latin honors in 1978 with a Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics. He subsequently spent a year as a visiting student at the École normale supérieure (Paris) from 1978 to 1979, before beginning his studies at Stanford University, where he graduated in 1982 with an Master of Science in Mathematics.
Haber earned his Doctor of Philosophy at Columbia University in 1987 under the advice of Zvi Galil with a thesis titled Provably Secure Multi-party Cryptographic Computation: Techniques and Applications.
== Career ==
That same year, Haber joined Bell Communications Research (Bellcore) as a research scientist. In 1989, Haber met W. Scott Stornetta, his future scientific partner and collaborator, when Stornetta joined Bellcore. Together they co-authored several publications in the field of cryptography. 
In 1994, Haber and Stornetta co-founded Surety Technologies, a spinoff of Bellcore. In 1995, Surety’s offering constituted the first commercial deployment of a blockchain and is currently the oldest continuously running blockchain.
For the next several years, Haber endeavored to bridge research and practical cybersecurity through his work, both at large established companies such as HP Labs and Hewlett Packard Enterprise, as well as at startups such as Intertrust Group and Surety. From 2004 to 2011, Haber served on the Board of Directors of the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR), a non-profit scientific organization whose aim is to further research cryptology and its related fields, which also organizes the premier technical conferences and journals in the discipline.
In 2017, Haber founded the cryptography and blockchain consultancy firm Stuart Haber Crypto, LLC, and is currently president of the company.
Haber also serves as a member of the advisory board for both Kadena, a hybrid blockchain platform, and Endor Software Ltd, an automated predictions platform that utilizes artificial intelligence in order to find patterns in human behavior.
== Contributions ==
For over 30 years, Haber has made significant contributions to the field of cryptography, distributed computing, and blockchain technology. Haber is also the co-inventor of several Surety patents.
His research during his time at Bellcore, along with W. Scott Stornetta, is widely considered to be the foundation for Bitcoin and other digital currencies. Haber and Stornetta are the most cited authors in Satoshi Nakamoto’s original Bitcoin white paper, of the eight citations, three reference their work.
Their 1991 paper "How to Time-Stamp a Digital Document” is where they first describe a system called "Blockchain". In this study, Haber and Stornetta sought to create mechanisms to create digital time stamps, offering a solution for maintaining the integrity of digital records and ensuring that they could not be modified or manipulated. 
In 1992, Haber, Stornetta, and Dave Bayer incorporated Merkle trees into their design, improving its efficiency by allowing many document certificates to be collected into one block. 
Under their company Surety, their blockchain's weekly summary hashes have been published in The New York Times every week since 1995.
Category:American cryptographers
Category:American computer scientists
Category:Harvard University alumni