Leonard Kleinrock

Leonard Kleinrock (New York, United States; 1934) studied at the Bronx High School of Science, a public center attended by Nobel Physics laureates Leon Cooper and Steven Weinberg, and Robert J. Lefkowitz, 2009 BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge laureate in Biomedicine and winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2012. Unable to afford university, he worked during the day as an electronics technician, then attended evening classes at the City College of New York where he completed a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering.

His excellent grades earned him a full graduate fellowship to pursue his studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). When the time came to choose a subject for his PhD, while most of his colleagues were delving into information theory, he preferred to break new ground in the virtually unknown area of data networks. In 1963, he joined the faculty at UCLA, where he continues today as Distinguished Professor of Computer Sciences.

Author of 18 patents, he has published over 250 papers and six books on a wide array of subjects, including packet switching networks, packet radio networks, local area networks, broadband networks, nomadic computing and peer-to-peer networks.

Dr. Kleinrock is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a founding member of the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the National Research Council. It was under his leadership that the latter organization prepared the strategic document “Towards a National Research Network” that became a cornerstone of technology policy. His multiple distinctions include the National Medal of Science, the highest honor for scientific merit, granted by the President of the United States.

It was just three months after the first manned mission landed on the moon. October 29, 1969. Two computers, one in the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) and the other in the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), established the first ever conversation between machines located at several kilometers’ distance. The engineer directing this exploit was Leonard Kleinrock, now Information and Communication Technologies laureate in the seventh edition of the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Awards for “his seminal contributions to the theory and practical development of the Internet,” in the words of the jury’s citation.

Kleinrock, Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at UCLA, refers to this 50 kilobytes per second connection, then considered high-speed, as the moment “the Internet uttered its first words.” Or its first word, to be more exact. The plan was to send the word ‘login’ from Kleinrock’s UCLA host. But the SRI received only the ‘l’ and ‘o’ before the system crashed, so the first message sent was actually “lo”.

The project was part of the Arpanet military program to develop a computer communications network. Leonard Kleinrock  had been recruited for his theoretical work on key requirements to get data flowing over a still hypothetical network. Trained as an electrical engineer at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), he studied under Claude Shannon — regarded as the founding father of information technology — and devoted his doctoral thesis to grappling with the problem of ‘getting computers to talk to each other.’

“Of course it was in the air, and had been there for some time — Kleinrock refers in passing to the work of Nikola Tesla at the start of the 20th century — but when I started it was not something that research teams were investigating on a competitive basis.”

Kleinrock had already recognized that the possibility to maximize resource sharing by users was an indispensable precondition to get computer networking off the ground, and had in fact solved the problem theoretically in the course of his doctoral studies. The solution he turned to was a mathematical tool called queuing theory, which studies how to manage a network with optimal efficiency by juggling resources and users. His work on the theory led him to packet switching technology, which, as the jury notes, is “one of the basic technologies behind the Internet.”

The new laureate offers an example illustrating the importance of network efficiency:“In a phone conversation, the line is exclusively dedicated to both users, even when they’re not speaking. I realized that a data network built in that way would be inefficient and prohibitively expensive.”

“In a phone conversation, the line is exclusively dedicated to both users, even when they’re not speaking. I realized that a data network built in that way would be inefficient and prohibitively expensive.”

TUITEAR

His development of queuing theory enabled network capacity to be shared through the application of packet switching: each message is broken down into small, equal-sized blocks and transmitted over the network by what we now call a router — providing access to the Internet backbone, and present in every connected home. The idea, essentially, is for these small data packets to occupy all the free space within the connection so they arrive faster than a single large packet and without problems of congestion.

Another example drawn from daily life: A supermarket queue would operate more efficiently — in terms of each customer’s average waiting time — if those with the smallest baskets paid first. An analogy for how packet switching works is that each customer pays the same small number of items each time a checkout becomes free, reducing the average waiting time of all those in the queue.

At the time of that first Arpanet connection, in 1969, Kleinrock had never seen his theories tested in practice, though a series of simulations had convinced him they would work. And the word “login” would prove him right. But did these architects of the Internet have any notion of the space it would occupy four decades later?

Even before that first hit-and-miss transmission, Kleinrock had outlined his vision of a “permanently available” future network, open to everyone and as “invisible” as electricity. Nowadays, he is convinced that the Internet’s impact will run deeper still. He foresees an everyday environment “full of cameras, sensors and small wearable devices,” that are continuously gathering and sending data on us all: “When I enter a room, the room will know it, and I’ll be able to ask it where I left my book or keys,” he predicts.“The Internet will become the global nervous system of the world.”