Yes. Yes yes yes.<p>Craig Gentry did more than just discover the first theoretical scheme, he reopened an interest in FHE. Yeah all the schemes are inefficient and will remain so for decades. But already the progress on FHE is incredible.<p>2007 for FHE was the 1982 for Secure Multi Party Computation. It will take 30 years, but I expect someday we'll see it privately allocating contracts in sugarbeet auctions.
I can think of few people who deserve it more. His recent work has been truly groundbreaking. Not just on FHE, either - multilinear maps, IO, lattices... I could go on. Just a brilliant dude.
This is awesome. Reading about his work and the subsequent work on FHE in general was one of my favorite "holy shit this is the future" moments. (And I don't have those moments hardly at all ... kind of silly. But I was giddy, and it was amazing, and so I was silly.)<p>It was also one of my foremost "I will never ever in my life be as smart as these guys" moments. Alas.
Google should be funding the heck out of this guy. Privacy concerns are only going to get bigger in the future, and the reason for that is simple: companies like Google are inevitably going to want <i>more and more</i> data. So at least they should be trying to do that in a privacy-friendly way.