Radia Perlman

Radia Perlman is an American computer scientist known for inventing the Spanning Tree Protocol while working at Digital Equipment Corporation in the 1980s. Computer networks built from many interconnected switches can develop loops that cause data to circulate endlessly and overwhelm the network; Perlman's protocol solved this by having the switches automatically compute a loop-free logical structure, a spanning tree, across the network while still keeping every device reachable, a solution that became a standard, widely deployed part of Ethernet networking. She also made significant contributions to link-state routing protocols and network security, and she is the author of a widely used textbook on network protocols and design, Interconnections. Perlman has often been informally credited, a description she has said she finds overstated, with the nickname mother of the Internet for the foundational role her network protocol work played in making large, reliable networks practical, and she holds numerous patents in networking and network security.