James Massey

James Lee Massey (born in 1934 in Wauseon, Ohio) is an information theorist and cryptographer, Professor Emeritus of Digital Technology at ETH Zurich. His notable work includes the application of the Berlekamp-Massey algorithm to linear codes, the design of the block ciphers IDEA (with Xuejia Lai) and SAFER, and the Massey-Omura cryptosystem (with Jim K. Omura).

Massey received a B.S. in electrical engineering in 1956 from the University of Notre Dame, and was granted an NSF Fellowship. After three years of military service, he began graduate studies in 1959 at MIT, where he concentrated on coding theory and was awarded a Ph.D. in 1962. He returned to Notre Dame, where he taught electrical engineering until 1977. After a brief period at UCLA, Massey accepted a position at ETH Zurich in 1980. He remained there until his retirement in 1998.

Honors and Awards

 * IEEE Fellow, 1971
 * Baker Prize, 1987
 * Claude E. Shannon Award, 1988
 * IEEE Alexander Graham Bell Medal, 1992
 * member, National Academy of Engineering