Perlman still values her failures most of all. Even with over 100 successful patents to her name, Dr. She laments that her constant pursuit of the perfect grade kept her from really understanding what she learned in high school, and discouraged her from pursuing a love of writing out of fear of subjective grades. Or, at least, broke her straight ‘A’ streak once or twice. Perlman wishes she failed more early on in her education. It also earned an average 4 star rating among 60 reviews on Goodreads for its “charming anecdotes”. Her “Interconnections: Bridges, Routers, Switches, and Internetworking Protocols” not only occupies an honored spot in the classroom. Perlman strives to avoid technical jargon wherever possible and include at least a little bit of humor in her textbooks. Remembering her own fear of words like “ham radio,” Dr. Her own memories of nervousness in that first Computer Science class at the Stevens Institute of Technology give her the empathy to relate to new nervous students wherever she teaches. Perlman also treasures her early difficulties in programming classes. Designing something that works no matter how the knobs are turned doesn’t just help novice users, it protects the system from actually malicious people, too.ĭr. For an algorithm, simplicity translates directly to efficiency and speed. Her distaste for complex algorithms and hard to operate machines lead her to simpler designs. Far from lamenting her difficulties with everyday technology, she considers a history of such struggles one of her great strengths. Nor does she particularly want to build a radio or computer from scratch. She doesn’t know how to help her daughter’s friends set up a printer. Perlman goes, she invents.Įven after decades leading the field in Computer Science academia, Dr. Since earning her PhD, Perlman has taught as a professor at the University of Washington, Harvard, and MIT and earned over 100 patents to her name. Her thesis, “Network Layer Protocols With Byzantine Robustness,” showed the world how to keep a network functional no matter how an individual router tried to mess things up. She returned to MIT to pursue a PhD in Computer Science. The same solution simply can’t help with the internet, so the internet really needs Perlman’s work.Īfter 10 years writing revolutionary papers on networking, Perlman no longer had any worries about diving into research. That’s 8 billion times as many chances for things to go wrong, and 8 billion times as many power buttons to press to turn everything off and back on again. You might fix your computer by turning it off but the internet consists of over 8 billion devices and cables stretched across the world. In her first decade in the software industry she published an article on how to keep the internet self-stabilizing, so that it could recover from damage. Over a single weekend as a fresh Master’s graduate at BBN, Perlman invented the spanning tree algorithm to connect devices to internet routers. She designed her own programming language and a heap of tools and devices to teach programming to young kids, inadvertently starting the field of “tangible computing.” Ill contented with such ‘childish’ work but unsure of how to start PhD research, she took a job at Bolt Beranek and Newman Technologies designing networking protocols. Īfter that one unpaid programming job, Perlman started taking the programming world by storm. Her first successful foray into Computer Science came from asking her boyfriend how to program so she could help out with a physics project as an MIT undergraduate. The impression she had already fallen too far behind kept Perlman from learning anything at all from the class. She felt intimidated by the other kids in the class bragging “they had built ham radios when they were seven,” devices she had never even heard of before. Perlman didn’t rock her first computer science class, either. Although her mom worked as a computer programmer and mathematician for the US government, the two mostly talked about music and literature unless some math assignment required explanation. The young Perlman, who would go on to invent the spanning tree algorithm and write her PhD thesis on how to keep the entire internet functional, didn’t really want to become a programmer. This week, we’ll meet Radia Perlman, professor and inventor of the technology that stands between Wi-Fi and the core of the internet. So far we’ve met Hedy Lamarr, inventor of the technology behind Wi-Fi, and Jayshree Ullal, CEO of a company constructing the internet backbone.
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