Serial Entrepreneur: Taher Elgamal (Part 2)

Here we trace Taher’s education, beginning at Cairo University and then as he moves on to Stanford and starts working on cryptography, the discipline that eventually made him famous.

SM: At Cairo University? TE: Yes, Cairo University. It is quite large and a very good school. When I came to the United States I was quite prepared. The school was taught in English.

SM: Most international students who have had a high school education elsewhere find themselves pretty competitive in America, especially in the Math and Sciences. Where did you do graduate school? TE: I came to Stanford in 1979 for a graduate degree in Electrical Engineering.

SM: What prompted that move? Was it a path a lot of people followed? TE: My older brother, five years earlier, had graduated from Stanford. He was able to help me get a research assistanceship for a master’s degree program.

SM: What kind of research were you doing? TE: It was actually related to control systems theory. My Masters degree was mostly in system theory. I also took a lot of math courses arbitrarily, and stumbled upon Marty Howard who was at the time head of the department. He is a very well known person in cryptography. I asked him if he wanted a new grad student, and he said he had one opening, so I signed up. That is how I started in Cryptography.

SM: So your PhD work is cryptography? TE: That is what made my name famous.

SM: What was the cryptography scene like when you started your program at Stanford? TE: Most of the problems were math problems. When I signed up, Marty gave me twenty open problems that he had lying on his desk. Some of them can never be solved, but I took one of them and decided to solve it. Out of solving that obscure mathematics problem came something the world now recognizes: the Discrete Quadratic Log Algorithm which is used for finding algorithms and factoring integers. It was completely arbitrary. In the technical community, which is not very large – people who actually understand how to factor large numbers – it is recognized as the first such attempt to use quadratics to solve these things, which is fascinating.

[to be continued]

[Part 1]
[Part 2]
[Part 3]
[Part 4]
[Part 5]
[Part 6]
[Part 7]
[Part 8]
[Part 9]
[Part 10]
[Part 11]
[Part 12]
[Part 13]

This segment is part 2 in the series : Serial Entrepreneur: Taher Elgamal
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