Radia Joy Perlman

Inventor of the spanning-tree protocol, which is fundamental to the operation of network bridges, Perlman is a software designer and network engineer sometimes referred to as the "Mother of the Internet," though she has preferred not to use that moniker. 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 was born in Portsmouth, Virginia, USA, and obtained a Bachelor's and Master's in Mathematics, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from MIT. Her doctoral thesis at MIT addressed the issue of routing in the presence of malicious network failures. 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, Perlman developed a "tiny" version of the educational robotics language LOGO, called TORTIS. During research performed in 1974–76, young children—the youngest aged 3½ years—programmed a LOGO educational robot called a Turtle. She has been described as a pioneer of teaching young children computer programming.

Perlman has been employed by Intel and held more than fifty patents from Sun alone. She is the author of one textbook on networking, "Interconnections: Bridges, Routers, Switches, and Internetworking Protocols" (2nd ed.), Addison-Wesley Professional Computing Series, ISBN 978-0201634488, and coauthor with Charlie Kaufman and Mike Speciner of "Network Security: Private Communication in a Public World" (2nd ed.), ISBN 978-0130614667.

She received an Honorary Doctorate from the Royal Institute of Technology on June 28, 2000. Perlman received several awards including the SVIPLA Silicon Valley Inventor of the Year Award on April 28, 2004, the USENIX Lifetime Achievement Award in 2006, and the SIGCOMM Award in 2010. She was also the recipient of the first Anita Borg Institute Women of Vision Award for Innovation in 2005.

She was named one of the 20 most influential people in the industry in the 20th anniversary issue of Data Communications magazine (January 15, 1992) and again in the 25th anniversary issue (January 15, 1997), the only person to be named in both issues.