Radia Perlman
lorenetworkingops culture
The engineer who invented the spanning tree algorithm at Digital in the 1980s, making bridged Ethernet survivable, and who wrote the algorithm's poem.
Her 1985 paper let bridges of arbitrary topology agree on a loop-free tree without a central authority, and the IEEE standardised it in 802.1D in 1990. Every switched network since has run a descendant. She wrote the specification with a poem attached, Algorhyme, whose first lines answer Joyce Kilmer: I think that I shall never see a graph more lovely than a tree. She also did the link-state work behind IS-IS. The nickname she is given, mother of the internet, obscures the actual contribution: not that she connected things, but that she made a redundant network safe to build, which is a different and harder problem.
Also known as: perlman, algorhyme