Education
Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
She is most famous for her invention of the spanning-tree protocol (STP), which is fundamental to the operation of network bridges, while working for Digital Equipment Corporation. She also made large contributions to many other areas of network design and standardization, such as link-state protocols, including TRILL, which she invented to correct some of the shortcomings of spanning-trees. She is currently employed by Electric Membership Corporation Corporation.
As an undergraduate at Massachusetts Institute of Technology she undertook a UROP (Undergraduate Research Opportunity), in lieu of course units, within the LOGO Laboratory at the (then) Massachusetts Institute of Technology Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
Working under the supervision of Seymour Papert, she developed a child-friendly version of the educational robotics language LOGO, called TORTIS ("Toddler"s Own Recursive Turtle Interpreter System"). During research performed in 1974-1976, young children—the youngest aged 3½ years, programmed a LOGO educational robot called a Turtle.
Radia has been described as a pioneer of teaching young children computer programming. Perlman obtained a Bachelor"s, Master"s in Mathematics, and a Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1988.
Her doctoral thesis at Massachusetts Institute of Technology addressed the issue of routing in the presence of malicious network failures.
She is most famous for her invention of the spanning-tree protocol (STP), which is fundamental to the operation of network bridges, while working for Digital Equipment Corporation. She also made large contributions to many other areas of network design and standardization, such as link-state protocols, including TRILL, which she invented to correct some of the shortcomings of spanning-trees. She is sometimes referred to as the "Mother of the Internet", a title which she dislikes.
Her work transformed the Ethernet protocol from using a few nodes over a limited distance, into something able to create large networks.
Perlman is the author of one textbook on networking and coauthor of one textbook on network security. She holds more than 100 issued patents.