Vinton G. Cerf is Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist for Google. Because of his contribution in designing the TCP/IP with Robert Elliot Kahn, who was an electrical scientist, he was considered as one of the “fathers of Internet”.
Vinton Gray Cerf was born in New Haven, Connecticut, on June 23, 1943. Even in high school, Cerf obtained an opportunity to join in the Apollo program at Rocketdyne for six months and took part in the statistical analysis software design for the non-destructive tests of the F-1 engines. Cerf became a system engineer supporting QUIKTRAN and worked at IBM for two years after graduating from the school of mathematics of Stanford University. Then he studied at the University of California, Los Angeles for his M.S. degree and PhD, and he achieved them in1970 and 1972 respectively.
During his time in UCLA, he met the most important person for his career, Kahn. In 1973, Kahn who was the IPTO program manager in DARPA approached Cerf, and in no time their first preliminary version of network, the ARPA Internet, was invented. Then TCP/IP was published after Cerf took part in IPTO and dealt with the office’s networking projects with.
From 1973 to 1982, Cerf worked for US military. In order to fulfill the requirement of the military, he devoted himself in several projects which are including TCP/IP, packet radio, packet satellite and packet security technology and so on.
From 1982 to 1986, Cerf left from DARPA to MCI and led the developing of Mail which is the first commercial email system that was connected to the internet.
Besides, Cerf became a vice president and Chief Internet Evangelist in Google in 2005, he also worked as chairman of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, which is devoted to supervise the explosion of information. He was famous for his predictions on how technology will affect future society, artificial intelligence, environmentalism, the advent of IPv6, etc.
In 2016, He helped NASA to install delay-tolerant networking on the International Space Station.
Vinton Cerf is an outstanding computer scientists who have obtained an eminent achievement on developing and spreading the Internet. His creative work, especially TCP/IP, have inspired generation after generation.
Nist (2018), “Biography of Dr. Vinton G. Cerf” available at: https://www.nist.gov/director/vcat/biography-dr-vinton-g-cerf (Accessed 26 Oct 2023)
Huffpost (2017), “Vint Cerf: Putting Humanity at the Center of the Internet” available at: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/vint-cerf-putting-humanity-at-the-center-of-the-internet_b_5a2da2e7e4b04e0bc8f3b601 (Accessed 26 Oct 2023)
Britannica (2023), “Vinton Cerf American computer scientist” available at: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Vinton-Cerf (Accessed 26 Oct 2023)
Wikipedia (2023), “Vint Cerf” available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vint_Cerf (Accessed 26 Oct 2023)