Addison Fischer

Addison Fischer is Principal, Zenerji LLC, Naples, Florida, and is elected as an Honorary Member. This company, founded in 2000, is an asset management company with major activities in worldwide conservation. Before founding Zenerji, he was a principal for RSA, 1980s to 1995, and also for VeriSign. He is a co-founder of Duquesne Capital Management, and of Allen Services Corporation. He founded Fischer International in 1982. He earned two degrees in Mathematics from West Virginia University, a BS in 1970, and an MS in 1972.

His major accomplishments include development of Executor for WVU's IBM S360 computer. This operating system modification materially increased job throughput by eliminating most of the operating system overhead required to schedule multiple jobs. Executor was the only commercially successful product that was actually a high function, high efficiency replacement for a significant portion of heretofore IBM supplied operating system software. This led to the founding of Allen Services Corporation.

Fischer also partnered to form Duquesne Capital Management, and wrote a program to analyze financial transactions that contributed to the early success of this venture, which continues today. He also founded Fischer International in Naples, Florida, which produced an Email system for IBM mainframes that, at one time, was used by over 200 of the Fortune 500 companies.

Fischer independently investigated prime number theory, and then partnered with three MIT professors to form RSA, Inc., and later VeriSign. Worldwide, he is named inventor on scores of technology patents, primarily in applications of cryptography.

More recently, Fischer has become actively involved in preserving for future generations our environment, resources, health, and freedom. He was a principal founder of the Community School of Naples and is a board member of the Amazon Conservation Team. In Costa Rica, Fischer has acquired and is preserving one of the largest privately owned tracts of rain forest in Central America, and by preventing poaching there has the only naturally expanding population of jaguars in Mesoamerica. Fischer is also protecting a large tract of wilderness in Patagonia. In addition, Zenerji supports the Jane Goodall Institute for Wildlife Research, Education and Conservation, of which he was recently elected a board member.

In 2000, he received the WVU Eberly College of Arts and Sciences Alumni Recognition Award.

He was nominated by George Trapp.