About Radia

Quick Facts
Full Name: Radia Joy Perlman
Born: Portsmouth, Virginia - December 18th, 1951
Best Known For: Network and security protocols

Radia Perlman, who grew up in New Jersey, found maths and science effortless from an early age. Her parents were engineers for the US government who loved to talk to her about literature and music. In high school, when Radia took a programming class, she was the only girl in the class! This was where her intertest in computers started. She then went on to study programming for physics at MIT and during her masters degree she designed a programming language with inputs and a functioning keyboard to help teach young school children how to code. Although she enjoyed working to inspire children into coding, she wanted to be taken seriously as a programmer. She took she learnings from designing and in 1971 she got her first job as a computer programmer.

Radia began learning about network protocols (a set of rules for formatting and processing data) in 1976 where she saw there was a lack of stability of the current protocols and said “If you just injected a few bad messages, the network would be down forever”. On realising that these protocols could not be so fragile, she began to create her own that was “self-stabilizing”. Radia designed a protocol called the ‘spanning tree algorithm’ which allowed ethernet to handle large clouds. She then further developed this to ensure it used the optimal bandwidth (The maximum rate of data that can be transferred over a path).

During her lifetime, Radia has issued over 100 patents and has been recognised with awards for her achievements. In addition to this, she has taught at many universities and given insights to people at events all around the world.