Leonard Kleinrock

Leonard Kleinrock (born June 13, 1934) is an American computer scientist and Internet pioneer. He is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at UCLA's Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science. Kleinrock made several important contributions to the field of computer science, in particular to the mathematical foundations of data communication in computer networking. He has received numerous prestigious awards.

In the early 1960s, Kleinrock pioneered the application of queueing theory to model delays in message switching networks in his Ph.D. thesis, published as a book in 1964. In the late 1960s and 1970s, he played an influential role in the development of the ARPANET. In the 1970s, he applied queueing theory to model and measure the performance of packet switching networks and published several of the standard works on the subject. He supervised graduate students who worked on the communication protocols for the ARPANET including students whose later work on internetworking and the Internet protocol suite led to the networking technology employed in the Internet. His theoretical work on hierarchical routing in the late 1970s with student Farouk Kamoun remains critical to the operation of the Internet today.