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My main “claims to fame”:
Created the first general purpose open source cryptography programming library (Crypto++, 1995), motivated by AI risk and what’s now called “defensive acceleration”.
Published one of the first descriptions of a cryptocurrency based on a distributed public ledger (b-money, 1998), predating Bitcoin.
Proposed UDT, combining the ideas of updatelessness, policy selection, and evaluating consequences using logical conditionals.
First to argue for pausing AI development based on the technical difficulty of ensuring AI x-safety (SL4 2004, LW 2011).
Identified current and future philosophical difficulties as core AI x-safety bottlenecks, potentially insurmountable by human researchers, and advocated for research into metaphilosophy and AI philosophical competence as possible solutions.
All of the fields that come to my mind (cryptography, theory of computation, algorithmic information theory, decision theory, game theory) were founded by much more established researchers. (But on reflection these all differ from AI safety by being fairly narrow and technical/mathematical, at least at their founding.) Which fields are you thinking of, that were founded by younger people and outsiders?
Perplexity AI Pro (with GPT-5.1-Thinking)’s answer to “Who were the founders of academic cryptography research as a field and what where their jobs at the time?”
There isn’t a single universally agreed-on “founder” of academic cryptography. Instead, a small group of researchers in the 1940s–1970s are usually credited with turning cryptography into an open, university-based research field.
No single founder
Histories of the subject generally describe a progression: Claude Shannon’s mathematical theory of secrecy in the 1940s, followed by the public‑key revolution of the 1970s and early 1980s that created today’s academic cryptography community. Shannon’s work was foundational, but it did not yet create an academic field in the modern sense; that came later with Whitfield Diffie, Martin Hellman, Ralph Merkle, and the inventors of RSA, whose work is often described as pioneering “modern” cryptography and has been recognized by ACM Turing Awards for cryptography pioneers.wikipedia+1
Early mathematical groundwork
Claude Shannon is widely regarded as the founder of mathematical cryptography; in the 1940s he worked at Bell Labs as a researcher, where he developed the information‑theoretic framework for secrecy systems that later influenced public‑key cryptography. At roughly the same time and into the 1960s, cryptography research also existed in industry—most notably at IBM, where Horst Feistel headed an internal cryptography research group that designed ciphers such as Lucifer, which evolved into the Data Encryption Standard (DES), but this work was largely not yet an open academic discipline.research.ibm+1
Founders of modern academic cryptography
Most accounts of “academic cryptography as a field” point first to the group around Stanford in the 1970s, whose work on public‑key ideas made cryptography a mainstream research topic in universities. In that period, the key people and their roles were approximately:sandilands+2
Whitfield Diffie – A researcher working with Martin Hellman at Stanford when they introduced public‑key cryptography in their 1976 work; he had come from earlier industry and research positions and was not yet a long‑tenured professor at that time.
Martin Hellman – A faculty member (electrical engineering professor) at Stanford University, supervising cryptography research and collaborating with Diffie on the new public‑key paradigm.sandilands
Ralph Merkle – A graduate student whose “Merkle puzzles” were developed first as an undergraduate project and then as part of his PhD work under Hellman at Stanford, making him one of the student‑level founders of modern academic cryptography.sandilands
These three are often singled out as the core founders of modern, open, university‑based cryptography research because their work shifted cryptography from a mostly classified or industrial activity into a widely studied academic topic.awards.acm+2
RSA and later theoretical founders
Immediately after the Diffie–Hellman–Merkle work, Ronald Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman introduced RSA while they were all at MIT, with Rivest and Shamir as faculty members and Adleman as a researcher/graduate student; this solidified public‑key cryptography as a central academic topic and led to sustained university research groups in cryptography. Their roles at MIT and the impact of RSA meant that, alongside the Stanford group, they are commonly treated as co‑founders of modern academic cryptography.
In the 1980s, researchers such as Manuel Blum, Shafi Goldwasser, and Silvio Micali (then faculty and graduate students at Berkeley and MIT) developed the complexity‑theoretic foundations of cryptography—zero‑knowledge proofs, formal security definitions, and provable security—which are why they are frequently listed among the leading theoreticians and foundational figures of the field in modern cryptographer lists.wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_cryptography
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cryptographers
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Cryptology_Conference
https://www.reddit.com/r/crypto/comments/6loygx/who_is_your_favorite_cryptography_researcher_and/
https://cryptography.isg.rhul.ac.uk/history.html
https://sandilands.info/crypto/OrganisationsandPeopleinCryptography.html
https://research.ibm.com/topics/cryptography
https://www.ibm.com/think/topics/cryptography-history
https://cryptoanarchy.wiki/people-and-organisations/pioneers-of-modern-cryptography
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptologist
https://www.reddit.com/r/cybersecurity/comments/1oo653i/ama_were_cryptography_and_security_researchers/
https://awards.acm.org/about/2015-turing
https://www.reddit.com/r/crypto/comments/393r8g/where_is_the_best_research_in_cryptography/
“What about theory of computation, algorithmic information theory, decision theory, game theory? You can be more concise with these.”
Each of these fields has several widely recognized “founders,” mostly mathematicians, logicians, and economists working in universities or research institutes. Below is a concise mapping from field → key founders → what they were professionally doing at the time.
Theory of computation
Modern theory of computation is usually traced to Alonzo Church and Alan Turing in the 1930s, along with related work by Kurt Gödel. Church was a logician and professor of mathematics at Princeton University when he introduced the lambda calculus and the Church–Turing thesis–style view of effective calculability. Turing was a young mathematician at Cambridge University when he published his 1936 paper defining Turing machines and formalizing computation, later becoming widely regarded as a founder of theoretical computer science.wikipedia+1
Algorithmic information theory
Algorithmic information theory was founded by Ray Solomonoff, an American mathematician who, working largely as an independent researcher on algorithmic probability and inductive inference, first presented the core ideas at a Caltech conference and in a 1960 report on a “General Theory of Inductive Inference.” It was then independently and almost simultaneously redeveloped by Andrey Kolmogorov, a leading Soviet mathematician, and Gregory Chaitin, a young mathematician working in industrial research, both of whom formalized similar notions of algorithmic complexity.wikipedia+2
Game theory
Modern game theory is generally credited to John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern. Von Neumann, a Hungarian mathematician working in pure and applied mathematics (including at Princeton and later the Institute for Advanced Study), introduced the foundational minimax theorem for zero‑sum games and then co‑authored Theory of Games and Economic Behavior in 1944 with Morgenstern, who was at the time an economist and professor (later at Princeton), thereby establishing game theory as a major branch of economics and social science.cmu+2
Decision theory
Normative decision theory in economics is typically traced to the von Neumann–Morgenstern expected‑utility framework, developed in the same 1944 book that founded game theory. In that work, von Neumann (mathematician) and Morgenstern (economist) provided an axiomatic treatment of rational choice under uncertainty, which is widely treated as the foundational formulation of modern decision theory in economics and statistics.wikipedia+2
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_computation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Solomonoff
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithmic_information_theory
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithmic_information_theory?oldformat=true
https://www.cmu.edu/dietrich/philosophy/research/areas/science-methodology/rational-choice.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oskar_Morgenstern
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_theory
https://thebrooklyninstitute.com/items/courses/new-york/alan-turing-algorithms-computation-machines/
https://www.reddit.com/r/compsci/comments/4vhxnk/why_is_turing_considered_the_father_of_computer/
https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/goedel-1931-founder-theoretical-computer-science-AI.html
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~lblum/PAPERS/AlanTuring_and_the_Other_Theory_of_Computation.pdf
https://principlesofcomputation.wordpress.com/what-is-theory-of-computation/
https://christosaioannou.com/History%20of%20Game%20Theory.pdf
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVw1j6pFQ5o
http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Algorithmic_information_theory
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theoretical_computer_science
https://www.cs.bu.edu/fac/lnd/research/al-i.htm
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/game-theory/
https://bgibhopal.com/what-is-the-theory-of-computation-and-why-is-it-important-in-computer-science/
Creating a new paradigm within an existing field seems different enough from creating a new field that the important factors might differ a lot. Also, by asking this question it seems like you’re assuming that someone should have created a new paradigm of AI safety in the last decade, which a lot of people would presumably disagree with (because they either think the existing paradigms are good enough, or this is just too hard technically). (Basically I’m suggesting it may be hard to interest people in this question, until someone has created such a paradigm, and then you can go back and say “why didn’t someone do this earlier?”)