Leonard Kleinrock

Leonard Kleinrock is Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at UCLA. Kleinrock created the basic principles of packet switching, the technology underpinning the Internet. He led the laboratory where the Internet was born and directed the transmission of the first message to pass over the Internet. He also introduced and extended the theory of queuing systems to model, analyze, design, and optimize packet switching networks. He developed the mathematical theory of data networks a decade before the Internet's birth. The birth of the Internet occurred in his UCLA laboratory (3420 Boelter Hall, now The Kleinrock Internet Heritage Site and Archive) when his host computer became the first node of the Internet in September 1969 and it was from there that he directed the transmission of the first message to pass over the Internet on October 29, 1969. He was the first President and Co-founder of Linkabit Corporation, the co-founder of Nomadix, Inc., and Founder and Chairman of TTI/Vanguard, an advanced technology forum organization. He has published over 250 papers and authored six books on a wide array of subjects, including packet switching networks, packet radio networks, local area networks, broadband networks, gigabit networks, nomadic computing, intelligent software agents, performance evaluation, and peer-to-peer networks. He is recipient of the 2007 National Medal of Science, the L.M. Ericsson Prize, the NAE Charles Stark Draper Prize, the Marconi International Fellowship Award, the Dan David Prize, the Okawa Prize, the IEEE Internet Millennium Award, the ORSA Lanchester Prize, the ACM SIGCOMM Award, the NEC Computer and Communications Award, the Sigma Xi Monie A. Ferst Award, the CCNY Townsend Harris Medal, the CCNY Electrical Engineering Award, the UCLA Outstanding Faculty Member Award, the UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award, the UCLA Faculty Research Lecturer, the INFORMS President's Award, the ICC Prize Paper Award, the IEEE Leonard G. Abraham Prize Paper Award, and the IEEE Harry M. Goode Award. Kleinrock is a member of the National Academy of Engineering. He has received honorary degrees from City College of New York (1997), the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (2000), the University of Bologna (2005), the Polytechnic University of Turin (2005), the University of Judaism (2007), and the Technion (2010).