Radia Perlman Joins Intel Ranks As Fellow
While it’s hard to top a label like “Mother of the Internet”, Radia Perlman has added another distinguished title to her list: Intel Fellow.
Intel’s CTO, Justin Rattner, announced this week that Perlman will be joining the Intel team. Dr. Perlman, an MIT grad, was with Sun Microsystems (which appears to have been swallowed whole by Oracle) where she was a Senior Distinguished Engineer.
Perlman holds more than 100 patents in encryption, decryption and routing, is a published author, and has repeatedly been named one of the 20 most influential people in her industry. Perlman’s focus has been network and security protocol, and she talked about her work in this 2006 interview from Network World.
A few years ago, Perlman received one of the first Anita Borg Institute Women of Vision awards, specifically for Innovation.
People - techies and geeks included - like to throw around the word “genius” a lot and generally use it to describe someone of exceptional intelligence or unmatched technical skill. Consider this more precise definition:
“More than just originality, creativity, or intelligence, genius is associated with achievement of insight which has transformational power.”
Perlman’s work is the backbone of the Internet, the skeleton upon which all the other matter depends, and that construct has transformed all our lives. For that reason alone, Radia Perlman is a true genius.
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March 4th, 2010 at 2:15 pm
Actually, she was a Sun Fellow before Oracle took over.
March 4th, 2010 at 2:28 pm
@Dawn Please forgive my poorly constructed sentence! I gave the impression that Dr. Perlman had become a Sun Fellow recently, which was unintentional. Perlman was named a Fellow at Sun in 2006. Oracle made its move to purchase Sun three years later.
Thanks for the correction!