Rabin has sadly just passed away at 94. This is a short piece on honoring him immediately. More is planned for the future.Besides what is mentioned, he developed a method of public key cryptography similar to RSA. He got it about the same time, and may have even been first.His work has touched key areas of mathematics as well as central areas of computer theory. Without his work theory would be completely different today.
It is a quirk of history that RSA caught on. For technical reasons, the Rabin method is trickier to use, but people could have figured out how to use it safely.
RSA was inspired by the Diffie-Hellman (DH) method. The elliptic curve variant of DH is now the most common used. It has the advantages of small keys, signatures, and idiot-proof key generation.
These are all quite secure, except for the possibility of quantum computers, which could break them all.
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