Talk:Ralph Merkle

Cleared it again

Lets keep this for discussions of the topic. CMC your edits are becoming no more than noise. They will not stand until they meet standards, and you have resolved your ban from wikipedia.

I haven't deleted a thing, its all in Archive (unlike your edits). — Preceding unsigned comment added by The Mark of the Beast (talk • contribs) 02:19, 27 October 2011‎

External links modified

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Unsourced personal information

Moved here per [{WP:PRESERVE]]. Per WP:BURDEN, don't restore with out finding RS, checking against them, and citing them.

Early life and education

Merkle graduated from Livermore High School in 1970 and proceeded to study computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, obtaining his B.A. in 1974, and his M.S. in 1977. In 1979 he received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering at Stanford University, with a thesis entitled Secrecy, authentication and public key systems; his advisor was Martin Hellman.

-- Jytdog (talk) 23:28, 20 May 2017 (UTC)

External links modified

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Substantial expansion and copyedit, May 2026

I made a series of substantive edits to the article. Summary so other editors can review:

• #Early life and education (new section). I restored the early-life material that Jytdog moved here in 2017 under #Unsourced personal information (Livermore High School 1970, BA/MS Berkeley, PhD Electrical Engineering Stanford under Hellman), now sourced inline to the subject's own Education and Work page per WP:ABOUTSELF. That page lists the same details Jytdog flagged as unsourced, plus the MS thesis title and the exact PhD conferral date (June 17, 1979). The 2017 talk thread should now be considered resolved.
• Lead expanded from one paragraph to two per MOS:LEAD, to summarize the whole article: the named inventions (Merkle's puzzles, Merkle–Hellman knapsack, Merkle–Damgård construction, Merkle trees), the career arc (Berkeley → Stanford → PARC → Zyvex → Georgia Tech → IMM/Alcor), and the flagship awards (Hamming Medal 2010, National Inventors Hall of Fame 2011).
• New #Research subsection: "Early work and Merkle's Puzzles" (three paragraphs). Covers the 1974 UC Berkeley class project origin, the puzzle scheme mechanics, the Diffie–Hellman 1976 paper crediting Merkle's manuscript as a precursor, and the Stanford collaboration leading to Merkle–Hellman knapsack cryptosystem. Sourced to Merkle 1978 CACM, Diffie–Hellman 1976 IEEE TIT, Merkle & Hellman 1978 IEEE TIT, and the 1979 Stanford thesis.
• New #Selected publications section listing seven significant papers (1978 CACM puzzles, 1978 knapsack, 1979 thesis, 1989/1990 Merkle–Damgård and certified-signature CRYPTO papers, 1990 Snefru, 1991 Khufu/Khafre). Each citation carries a DOI that resolves via doi.org and was cross-checked against Crossref.
• Citations added inline: previously unsupported Khufu/Khafre and Snefru sentences now cite the original Springer/J. Crypt. papers; Elxsi/PARC/Zyvex/Bay Area dates cite the eduWork bio.
• Removed unsupported claim: the previous text said the Hertz Foundation was based in Livermore. The foundation's contact page and IRS filings indicate Pleasanton, so I removed it. Restore with a reliable secondary source if I'm mistaken.
• WP:PEACOCK scrub: "renowned cryptographer", "baseball star Fred Merkle", and similar evaluative language replaced with factual phrasing. Spelling standardized to "public-key" (matching the article title at public-key cryptography).
• Sister projects: added {{Commons category}}; existing {{Wikiquote}} preserved.
• Illustration: added File:Hash Tree.svg to the Hashing subsection with MOS:ACCESS alt text. The image is from Merkle tree.
• MOS:LINK: simplified `Carol Shaw` to `Carol Shaw` since the article was renamed.
• Categories: added Category:Stanford University alumni, Category:University of California, Berkeley alumni, Category:21st-century American inventors.
• Structure: fixed the duplicate `==References==` heading (the second was renamed `==Further reading==` per MOS:LAYOUT); renamed `==Contributions==` to `==Research==` (more standard for an academic biography).

Open to feedback on any of this. Sparks19923 (talk) 10:23, 11 May 2026 (UTC)