Sometimes referred to as the mother of the internet, this week’s Wednesday’s Women in STEM Series features Radia Perlman, a computer scientist who’s work helped make today’s internet possible.
Radia Perlman grew up in New Jersey and was the daughter of two engineers. She remembers math and science to be “effortless and fascinating” but also enjoyed music such as the piano and French horn. Perlman and her mother would often talk about music and literature while working on her math homework. In high school, she took a computer science class and was the only female student. This was when she started to consider a career that involved computers.
Perlman attended MIT in the 60’s for both her undergraduate in mathematics as well as her PhD in computer science. She remembers being one of about 50 female students in a class of about 1,000. It was here that she developed a child-friendly version of an educational computer program called TORTIS (Toddler’s Own Recursive Turtle Interpreter System) teaching children as young as 3 years old to program an educational robot called a Turtle.
She is most famous for inventing the Spanning Tree Protocol (STP), a computer algorithm that is used to operate network bridges. This program is an integral part of how modern day internet works. Simply stated, the algorithm allows the network to use loops so data could reach the correct destination without flooding the network. Later she invented TRILL which corrected some of the limitations of STP. Without these two computer programs, the internet as we know it wouldn’t exist and yet most people haven never heard of Radia Perlman or the Spanning Tree Protocol!
“The world would be a better place if more engineers, like me, hated technology. The stuff I design, if I’m successful, nobody will ever notice. Things will just work, and will be self-managing.”