Frank Thomson Leighton | |
|---|---|
| Born | October 28, 1956 |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | Princeton University (BSE) Massachusetts Institute of Technology (PhD) |
| Spouse | Bonnie Berger |
| Awards |
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| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Applied mathematics |
| Institutions | Akamai Technologies Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| Thesis | Layouts for the shuffle-exchange graph and lower bound techniques for VLSI (1981) |
| Doctoral advisor | Gary Miller |
| Doctoral students | Peter Shor, Mohammad Hajiaghayi, Robert Kleinberg, Satish Rao[1] |
Frank Thomson "Tom" Leighton (born 1956) is an American mathematician who is the CEO of Akamai Technologies, the company he co-founded with the late Daniel Lewin in 1998.[2] Leighton discovered a solution to free up web congestion using applied mathematics and distributed computing.[3] Under his leadership, Akamai has evolved from its origins as a content delivery network (CDN) into the world's most distributed cloud platform, with leading solutions for content delivery, cybersecurity, and cloud computing.
He is on leave as a professor of applied mathematics and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He received his B.S.E. in electrical engineering from Princeton University in 1978, and his Ph.D. in mathematics from MIT in 1981.[4] His brother, David T. Leighton, is a full professor at the University of Notre Dame specializing in transport phenomena.[5] Their father was a U.S. Navy colleague and friend of Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, the father of naval nuclear propulsion and a founder of the Research Science Institute (RSI).
Leighton is a preeminent authority on algorithms for network applications, and has published over 100 papers on algorithms, cryptography, parallel architectures, distributed computing, combinatorial optimization, and graph theory. He also holds numerous patents involving content delivery, Internet protocols, algorithms for networks, cryptography, and digital rights management. His text on Parallel Algortihms and Architectures was translated into French and German, and the Chinese-language version of his textbook with Lehman and Meyer, Mathematics for Computer Science, has sold well over 100,000 copies. His lectures on math for computer science have been viewed more than five million times on YouTube.[6]
Leighton has been on numerous government, industry, and academic advisory panels, including the Presidential Informational Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC) and chaired its subcommittee on cybersecurity.[7] He is on the board of trustees of the Society for Science & the Public (SSP) and of the Center for Excellence in Education (CEE), and he has participated in the Distinguished Lecture Series at CEE's flagship program for high school students, the Research Science Institute (RSI).