During the 16th century, Vigenere designed a cipher that was supposedly the first cipher which used an encryption key.

Who is the founder of cryptography?

Claude E. Shannon is considered by many to be the father of mathematical cryptography. Shannon worked for several years at Bell Labs, and during his time there, he produced an article entitled "A mathematical theory of cryptography".

Who was the inventor of public key cryptography?

The idea of public key cryptography was first presented by Martin Hellman, Ralph Merkle, and Whitfield Diffie at Stanford University in 1976. They used a method which they referred to as the subset-sum problem, but which has been come to be known as the knapsack problem.