Cryptography is hell of an interesting thing. I have been studying it since last few days and i thought of sharing some not-so-worthy information with you guys.
Obviously RSA is not the only public key algorithm. The first public key algorithm was the 'knapsack' algorithm which was designed by Merkle and Hellman. The algorithm's information Ralph Merkle was sure enough that his algo could not be broken. So he offered a 100$ reward to anyone who could break it. Adi Shamir ( the S in RSA ) broke the algo and took the
reward.Again, Merkle strengthened his algorithm and offered 1000$ to anyone who could break the modified one. Then it was the turn of Ronald Rivest (the R in RSA) who broke it and took the reward.Merkle did not dare to offer 10000$ for the next version so Leaonard Adleman (the A in RSA) was out of luck.
Courtesy : Computer Networks by Andrew S Tennenbaum.