Is RSA inspired by Diffie Hellman? I read a bit of A Method for Obtaining Digital Signatures and Public-Key Cryptosystems that introduced RSA in 1977, and, while learning the steps in RSA a few days ago, I noticed that they are similar to the Diffie-Hellman key exchange. Was RSA inspired by Diffie-Hellman, published the year before in 1976, as in does the cryptography rely on earlier work and re-use parts from Diffie-Hellman and modular exponentiation, and the secret being the inverse of the encrypted message?
Was RSA inspired by Diffe-Hellman, published the year before in 1976


Update

I met Ron Rivest at MIT's LCS35 time capsule unveiling and asked him this question for you.

The answer is yes.

Original Answer

In "The first ten years of public-key cryptography", the following social relationships are mentioned:


  Ron Rivest had been a graduate student in computer science at Stanford while I was working on proving the correctness of programs at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. One of my colleagues in that work was Zohar Manna, who shortly returned to Isreal and supervised the doctoral research of Adi Shamir, at the Weitzman Institute. 


So Rivest went to the same school where Whitfield Diffie was working, and Zohar Manna apparently brought the knowledge to the attention of Adi Shamir.

So they certainly must have been aware of Diffie and Hellman's work.

In fact, the original paper on RSA cites the paper "New Directions in cryptography" by Diffie and Hellman, so that's pretty much a smoking gun that proves that they were building off the work of Diffie and Hellman.