Martin Hellman

Professor Emeritus of Electrical Engineering, Stanford University

Martin Hellman is best known for his role in inventing public key cryptography, the technology that enables secure Internet transactions. He also has contributed to the computer privacy debate, and was a key participant in the “first crypto war” of the late 1970s that established the right to publish papers without government interference
Prof. Hellman has a deep interest in the ethics of technological development, especially how human thinking must evolve for survival in the nuclear age. His efforts to overcome ethnic tension within the university have been recognized by three awards from minority student organizations.
He received his B.E. from New York University in 1966, and his M.S. and Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1967 and 1969, all in Electrical Engineering. After teaching at MIT, he returned to Stanford’s EE faculty. He has authored over seventy technical papers, twelve US patents and a number of foreign equivalents.