Hertz Fellow Ray Sidney

Dr. Ray Sidney received an AB in Mathematics from Harvard in 1991 and, with the generous assistance of the Hertz Foundation, a PhD in Mathematics from MIT in 1995. His work in graduate school was in the field of cryptography, and was supervised by Turing Award-winning and Gödel Prize-winning Professor Silvio Micali.
Ray's mathematical interests include cryptography, probability, logic, complexity, and real analysis. From 1995-2004 he worked in the fields of computer security and software engineering at D.E. Shaw, RSA Labs, and Google, among other companies. He supplied the implementation expertise for the RC6 block cipher, RSA's submission to NIST's competition to find a successor to the Data Encryption Standard.
Ray is currently interested in the problems that humanity is facing in the realms of energy, population, and the environment. He is also passionate about youth education, and is involved in local educational efforts.
Since 2005, Ray has been active in investing in real estate and various private companies. He is the principal for Big George Ventures—a real estate investment company that briefly thought it was a real estate developer—and he serves on the boards of Hemedex, Inc. and Covia Labs. He is also a member of the X PRIZE Foundation's Vision Circle, and he serves on various committees at MIT.