Radia Perlman

Radia Perlman

Born	Portsmouth, Virginia
Citizenship	United States
Fields	Computer Science
Institutions	Intel
Alma mater	MIT
Known for	Network and security protocols; computer books

Radia Joy Perlman (born 1951 in Portsmouth, Virginia, USA) is a software designer and network engineer sometimes referred to as the "Mother of the Internet."^[1] 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. She also made large contributions to many other areas of network design and standardization, such as link-state protocols, including TRILL, which she invented to correct some of the shortcomings of spanning-trees. She obtained a Bachelor's, Master's in Mathematics, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from MIT.^[2] Her doctoral thesis at MIT^[3] addressed the issue of routing in the presence of malicious network failures.

Perlman is the author of one textbook on networking and coauthor of one textbook on network security. She is currently employed by Intel. She holds more than fifty patents from Sun alone.^[4]

1 Early research
2 Bibliography
3 Awards
4 References
5 External links

Early research [link]

As an undergraduate at MIT she undertook a UROP (Undergraduate Research Opportunity), in lieu of course units, within the LOGO Lab at the (then) MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Working under the supervision of Seymour Papert, she developed a "tiny" version of the educational robotics language LOGO, called TORTIS. During research performed in 1974-6, young children—the youngest aged 3½ years, programmed a LOGO educational robot called a Turtle. Radia has been described as a pioneer of teaching young children computer programming.^[5]

Bibliography [link]

Perlman, Radia (1999). Interconnections: Bridges, Routers, Switches, and Internetworking Protocols (2 ed.). Addison-Wesley Professional Computing Series. ISBN 978-0-201-63448-8.
Perlman, Radia; Kaufman, Charlie; Speciner, Mike. Network Security: Private Communication in a Public World (2 ed.). ISBN 978-0-13-061466-7.

Awards [link]

SIGCOMM Award (2010)^[6]
USENIX Lifetime Achievement Award (2006)
Recipient of the first Anita Borg Institute Women of Vision Award for Innovation in 2005^[7]
SVIPLA (Silicon Valley Inventor of the year) - (April 28, 2004)
Honorary Doctorate, Royal Institute of Technology - (June 28, 2000)
Again, named as one of the 20 most influential people in the industry in the 25th anniversary issue of Data Communications magazine. (Only person to be named in both issues.) - (January 15, 1997)
Named as one of the 20 most influential people in the industry in the 20th anniversary issue of Data Communications magazine. - (January 15, 1992)