This is `the amazing story of how Merkle proposed public-key cryptography as a class project in grad school, and the professor described it as a “muddled terribly”, and then he submitted it to CACM, which rejected it because it was “outside of the mainstream of cryptographic thinking.”'

[As related by Gilles Brassard via Aram Harrow. See http://dabacon.org/pontiff/?p=5728]