At MIT he supervised doctoral students who became prominent computer scientists, including David S. Johnson, Frances Yao, and Michael Hammer.
[3] Fischer's 1985 work with Nancy A. Lynch and Michael S. Paterson[4] on consensus problems received the PODC Influential-Paper Award in 2001.
Jennifer Welch writes that “This result has had a monumental impact in distributed computing, both theory and practice.
In 2003, the distributed computing community honoured Fischer's 60th birthday by organising a lecture series during the 22nd PODC,[7] with Leslie Lamport, Nancy Lynch, Albert R. Meyer, and Rebecca Wright as speakers.
[16] Other contributions related to cryptography include the study of key exchange problems and a protocol for oblivious transfer.
[16] In 1984, Fischer, Silvio Micali, and Charles Rackoff[17] presented an improved version of Michael O. Rabin's protocol for oblivious transfer.