Van Jacobson
lorenetworking
The author of Congestion Avoidance and Control, the 1988 work that gave TCP the algorithms - slow start, congestion avoidance, fast retransmit - that stopped the internet collapsing under its own load.
In the mid-1980s the network suffered congestion collapse: throughput between two sites fell by three orders of magnitude, because every sender responded to loss by retransmitting harder. His fix was to make each sender infer the state of a network it cannot see, from the only evidence it has - the timing and loss of its own packets - and to back off. That inference is still what every TCP connection does. It is also why a link can be busy while nothing feels fast, and why bufferbloat took decades to be recognised as the same problem wearing a different hat.
Also known as: jacobson, congestion avoidance