Radia Perlman

Radia Perlman
Born (1951-12-18) December 18, 1951 (age 72)
Portsmouth, Virginia, US
Alma materMIT
Known forNetwork and security protocols; computer books
Scientific career
FieldsComputer Science
InstitutionsIntel
ThesisNetwork layer protocols with Byzantine robustness (1988)
Doctoral advisorDavid D. Clark

Radia Joy Perlman (/ˈreɪdiə/;[1] born December 18, 1951) is an American computer programmer and network engineer. She is a major figure in assembling the networks and technology to enable what we now know as the internet. She is most famous for her invention of the Spanning Tree Protocol (STP), which is fundamental to the operation of network bridges, while working for Digital Equipment Corporation, thus earning her nickname "Mother of the Internet".[2] Her innovations have made a huge impact on how networks self-organize and move data. She also made large contributions to many other areas of network design and standardization: for example, enabling today's link-state routing protocols, to be more robust, scalable, and easy to manage.

Perlman was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2019 for contributions to Internet routing and bridging protocols.[3] She holds over 100 issued patents. She was elected to the Internet Hall of Fame in 2014, and to the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2016.[4][5] She received lifetime achievement awards from USENIX in 2006 and from the Association for Computing Machinery’s SIGCOMM in 2010.[6][7]

More recently she has invented the TRILL protocol to correct some of the shortcomings of spanning trees, allowing Ethernet to make optimal use of bandwidth. As of 2022, she was a Fellow at Dell Technologies.[8]

  1. ^ "Making Data Flow: The Radia Perlman Story". National Inventors Hall of Fame. May 9, 2016. Retrieved September 2, 2022.
  2. ^ "Radia Perlman Spanning Tree Protocol". NAE Website. Retrieved July 20, 2021.
  3. ^ "Dr. Radia J. Perlman". National Academy of Engineering. Retrieved June 30, 2023.
  4. ^ "Radia Perlman". Internet Hall of Fame. Retrieved June 30, 2023.
  5. ^ "Radia Perlman: Robust Network Routing and Bridging". National Inventors Hall of Fame. 2016. Retrieved June 30, 2023.
  6. ^ "Flame Award". USENIX. December 6, 2011. Retrieved June 30, 2023.
  7. ^ "SIGCOMM Award Recipients". ACM SIGCOMM. Retrieved June 30, 2023.
  8. ^ Kaufman, Charlie; Perlman, Radia; Speciner, Mike; Perlner, Ray (September 15, 2022). Network Security: Private Communication in a Public World (Prentice Hall Series in Computer Networking and Distributed Systems) 3rd Edition. Addison-Wesley. ISBN 978-0136643609.