Richard Leibler
American mathematician and cryptanalyst · United States · On the map · Academics · Lived 1914 to 2003 · aged 89
Richard A. Leibler was an American mathematician and cryptanalyst. Richard Leibler was born in March 1914. He received his A.M. in mathematics from Northwestern University and his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois in 1939.
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While working at the National Security Agency, he and Solomon Kullback formulated the Kullback-Leibler divergence, a measure of similarity between probability distributions which has found important applications in information theory and cryptology. Leibler is also credited by the NSA as having opened up "new methods of attack" in the celebrated VENONA code-breaking project during 1949-1950; this may be a reference to his joint paper with Kullback, which was published in the open literature in 1951 and was immediately noted by Soviet cryptologists.
