Pylimitics

It’s not as unusual as you might think for an idea or invention to arise more than once, completely independently, even at roughly the same time. That’s the case with public-key encryption, which is widely used today. The “s” in “https” that precedes website URLs stands for “secure,” and depends on that kind of encryption.

Public-key encryption is mathematical, and depends on a method developed in 1977 by Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman. It’s known as the RSA algorithm, after the initials of their surnames. What’s less known is that they were not the first to come up with the system. British mathematician Clifford Cocks did so several years earlier, but he was working for the British government, which classified his work until 1997. They never used it, though. They also didn’t classify or encrypt his birthday, which is today; he’s 73. 

Cocks was born in Cheshire, England, in 1950. He was always talented at math, and chose that as his major as an undergraduate at King’s College, Cambridge. He won a silver medal at the International Mathematical Olympiad in 1968. He then continued in the doctoral program at Oxford, but never completed his PhD. Instead, he joined the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), and developed the encryption system almost immediately. GCHQ couldn’t figure out any use for it, but declared it secret anyway. Cocks wasn’t able to tell anyone about his work for the next 24 years.

Cocks didn’t let that slow him down. He became the chief mathematician at GCHQ, and established the Heilbronn Institute for Mathematical Research at the University of Bristol. His lack of a PhD degree was corrected in 2008 by the University of Bristol, which awarded him an honorary degree, and by the University of Birmingham, which did the same in 2015. He was elected to the Cryptologic Hall Of Honor in 2021. You could go see his award, but its location is in code. (Just kidding — it’s a memorial in the National Security Agency headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland.)