Ronald Linn Rivest (/rɪˈvɛst/; born May 6, 1947) is a cryptographer and an Institute Professor at MIT. He is a member of MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and a member of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). He was a member of the Election Assistance Commission's Technical Guidelines Development Committee, tasked with assisting the EAC in drafting the Voluntary Voting System Guidelines.

Rivest is one of the inventors of the RSA algorithm (along with Adi Shamir and Len Adleman). He is the inventor of the symmetric key encryption algorithms RC2, RC4, RC5, and co-inventor of RC6. The "RC" stands for "Rivest Cipher", or alternatively, "Ron's Code". (RC3 was broken at RSA Security during development; similarly, RC1 was never published.) He also authored the MD2, MD4, MD5 and MD6 cry.ptographic hash functions. In 2006, he published his invention of the ThreeBallot voting system, a voting system that incorporates the ability for the voter to discern that their vote was counted while still protecting their voter privacy. Most importantly, this system does not rely on cryptography at all. Stating "Our democracy is too important," he simultaneously placed ThreeBallot in the public domain.

Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Photo by Ronald L. Rivest (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.

Thomas H. Cormen is Emeritus Professor and former Chair of the Dartmouth College Department of Computer Science and former director of the Dartmouth College Institute for Writing and Rhetoric. He received the B.S.E. degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Princeton University in 1978 and the S.M. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT in 1986 and 1993, respectively. He is coauthor of the leading textbook on computer algorithms, Introduction to Algorithms, which he wrote with Charles E. Leiserson, Ronald L. Rivest, and Clifford Stein. The book, now in its fourth edition, has been translated into several languages. He is also the author of Algorithms Unlocked, a gentle introduction to understanding computer algorithms and how they relate to real-world problems.

Outside computer science, Cormen likes skating (inline and nordic), paddling, and cooking and eating barbecue. He considers himself the world's worst electrician who has a Ph.D. in electrical engineering.

Charles E. Leiserson is Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.