Leonard Adleman
Leonard Adleman is a noted theoretical computer scientist and professor of Computer Science and Molecular Biology at the University of Southern California. He is known for being the inventor of the RSA Cryptosystem (RSA stands for Rivest-Shamir-Adleman) in 1977 and DNA Computing. The former is now ubiquitous in security applications, including digital signatures. The latter may very well herald the future of computing.
In 1994, his paper "Molecular Computation of Solutions To Combinatorial Problems" described the experimental use of DNA as a computational system. In it, he solved a seven-node instance of the Hamiltonian Graph problem, an NP-Complete problem similar the Travelling Salesman Problem. While the solution to a seven-node instance is trivial, this paper is the first known instance of the successful use of DNA to compute an algorithm. DNA Computing has been shown to have potential as a means to solve several other large scale combinatorial search problems.
For his contribution to the invention of the RSA Cryptosystem, Adleman was a recipient along with Rivest and Shamir of the 2002 ACM Turing Award, often called the Nobel Prize of Computer Science.