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Nigel Smart (cryptographer)

British cryptographer

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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 10, 2026
Entity authorityQ1476239
Source-derived summary

Nigel Smart is a professor at COSIC at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven and Chief Cryptographer at Zama. He is a cryptographer with interests in the theory of cryptography and its application in practice.

Education

Smart received a BSc degree in mathematics from the University of Reading in 1989.

He then obtained his PhD degree from the University of Kent at Canterbury in 1992; his thesis was titled The Computer Solutions of Diophantine Equations.

Career

Smart proceeded to work as a research fellow at the University of Kent, the Erasmus University Rotterdam, and Cardiff University until 1995. From 1995 to 1997, he was a lecturer in mathematics at the University of Kent, and then spent three years in industry at Hewlett-Packard from 1997 to 2000. From 2000 to 2017 he was at the University of Bristol, where he founded the cryptology research group. From 2018 he has been based in the COSIC group at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, where he is now a part-time professor.

Smart held a Royal Society Wolfson Merit Award (2008–2013), and two ERC Advanced Grant (2011–2016 and 2016-2021). He was a director of the International Association for Cryptologic Research (2012–2014), and was elected vice president for the period 2014-2016.

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The public source identifies “Nigel Smart (cryptographer)” as british cryptographer. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Nigel, Smart and cryptographer.

Editorial reviewA practical starting point whose main value is the path it opens into stronger specialist and primary sources. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1989, 1992, 1995, 1997—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1967-10-22. Its value is orientation rather than verdict, with Nigel, Smart and cryptographer providing the first useful test.
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A short description can identify a subject without explaining its stakes. For “Nigel Smart (cryptographer)”, the useful work is to connect “british cryptographer” to the records capable of establishing context and consequence.

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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1476239. VIAF identifies the subject as 10714160. The Library of Congress control number is n98044589. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1989, 1992, 1995 and 1997.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from Nigel Smart (cryptographer)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.