23 Facts About Radia Perlman

Radia Joy Perlman is an American computer programmer and network engineer.

Radia Perlman is a major figure in assembling the networks and technology to enable what we now know as the internet.

Radia Perlman is most famous for her invention of the spanning-tree protocol, which is fundamental to the operation of network bridges, while working for Digital Equipment Corporation, thus earning her nickname "Mother of the Internet".

Radia Perlman's innovations have made a huge impact on how networks self-organize and move data.

Radia Perlman 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.

Radia Perlman currently holds over 100 issued patents and many prestigious awards in the field of computer science such as Lifetime Achievement awards and the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Data Communication.

Radia Perlman's father worked on radar and her mother was a mathematician by training who worked as a computer programmer.

Radia Perlman graduated from Ocean Township High School in 1969.

Radia Perlman has been described as a pioneer of teaching young children computer programming.

Radia Perlman earned her PhD in computer science from MIT in 1988; her doctoral thesis on routing in environments where malicious network failures are present serves as the basis for much of the work that now exists in this area.

Radia Perlman later said that she was so used to the gender imbalance, that it became normal.

Radia Perlman is most famous for this invention, the Spanning Tree Protocol, which is fundamental to the operation of network bridges.

Radia Perlman has taught courses at the University of Washington, Harvard University and MIT, and has been the keynote speaker at events all over the world.

Radia Perlman is the recipient of awards such as Lifetime Achievement awards from Usenix and the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Data Communication.

Radia Perlman invented the spanning tree algorithm and the Spanning Tree Protocol.

Radia Perlman utilized the fact that bridges had unique 48 bit MAC addresses, and devised a network protocol so that bridges within the LAN communicated with one another.

Radia Perlman said that the benefits of the protocol amount to the fact that "you don't have to worry about topology" when changing the way a LAN is interconnected.

Radia Perlman has however criticized changes which were made in the course of the standardization of the protocol.

Radia Perlman was the principal designer of the DECnet IV and V protocols, and IS-IS, the OSI equivalent of OSPF.

Radia Perlman made major contributions to the Connectionless Network Protocol.

Radia Perlman has collaborated with Yakov Rekhter on developing network routing standards, such as the OSI Inter-Domain Routing Protocol, the OSI equivalent of BGP.

Radia Perlman subsequently worked as a network engineer for Sun Microsystems, now Oracle.

Radia Perlman specialized on network and security protocols and while working for Oracle obtained more than 50 patents.