I don't think Coppersmith is a very good example here. The dude has had his finger in everything, including building DES, MARS, SEAL, Scream, the shrinking generator, asymptotically fast matrix multiplication, etc.
Coppersmith always comes into my head because of that thing Schneier wrote about him being the world's cleverest cryptanalyst in _Applied Cryptography_. But you're obviously right.
