Earlier this week, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) awarded the John von Neumann Medal to Tom Leighton, MIT professor of Applied Mathematics and CSAIL principal investigator and Akamai CEO and co-founder. Each year, IEEE awards individuals with medals for their impactful work on technology, society, and the engineering profession.
Leighton received the medal for his groundbreaking algorithms designed to improve content delivery networks. As a result of these designs’ network applications, he is often credited with helping make the Internet faster and more secure.
To his credit, Leighton has published over 100 papers on subjects including algorithms, cryptography, parallel architectures, and distributed computing. He is viewed as a key authority figure on algorithms for network applications, having designed the algorithms that deliver trillions of content requests over the Internet daily.
He also pioneered CSAIL spin-off company Akamai Technologies in 1998. Akamai serves up to 30 percent of the world’s web traffic, establishing the company as the world’s leading content delivery network provider.
IEEE previously awarded Leighton with the Babbage Award. His other distinctions include the Marconi Prize, the MIT Entrepreneurship Award, the ACM-SIGACT Distinguished Service Prize, and being named as a member of the National Inventors Hall of Fame, the Massachusetts Innovation & Technology Exchange (MITX) Innovators Hall of Fame and one of the Ten Top Technology Innovators by US News and World Report. He is also a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, a Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, and a Member of the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Sciences, and the Massachusetts Academy of Sciences.
