Voting Station

Radia Perlman

Please vote to return to collections.

Computer Tech

The Resume

    (December 18, 1951- )
    Born in Portsmouth, Virginia
    Developed spanning tree protocol (STP) which enabled the mapping of loop-free paths in internet networks
    Updated STP with the more robust protocol TRILL (Transparent Interconnection of Lots of Links)
    Holds over 100 patents
    Wrote 'Interconnections: Bridges, Routers, Switches, and Internetworking Protocols' and 'Network Security: Private Communication in a Public World'
    Inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame (2016)
    Nicknamed 'Mother of the Internet'

Why she might be annoying:

    She was obsessed with getting straight A's in high school, one result of which was 'English made me nervous because of the selective grading.'
    While at MIT, she developed a child-friendly version of the robotics language LOGO but abandoned the project because 'Being the only woman around, I wanted to be taken seriously as a scientist and was a little embarrassed that my project involved cute little kids.'
    She accompanied the STP protocol with a knockoff of Joyce Killmer's 'Trees': 'I think that I shall never see/A graph more lovely than a tree/A tree whose crucial property/Is loop-free connectivity....'
    She disliked the 'Mother of the Internet' title, noting 'No single technology really caused the internet to succeed.'

Why she might not be annoying:

    She wrote the STP algorithm in a week.
    She noted, 'My designs were so deceptively simple that it was easy for people to assume I just had easy problems, whereas others, who made super-complicated designs (that were technically unsound and never worked) and were able to talk about them in ways that nobody understood, were considered geniuses.'
    Her work was described as having established 'the basic traffic rules' for the internet .
    She was the only person included in 'Data Communication' magazines lists of the most influential people in both their 20th (1992) and 25th (1997) anniversary issues.
    She said, 'The kind of diversity that I think really matters isn't skin shade and body shape, but different ways of thinking.'

Credit: C. Fishel


Featured in the following Annoying Collections:

Year In Review:

    In 2023, Out of 1 Votes: 0% Annoying
    In 2022, Out of 1 Votes: 0% Annoying