An Interview with Leonard Kleinrock

Leonard Kleinrock, developer of the mathematical theory behind packet switching, has the unique distinction of having supervised the transmission of the first message between two computers. As a doctoral student at MIT in the early 1960s, Kleinrock extended the mathematical discipline of queuing theory to networks, providing a mathematical description of packet switching, in which a data stream is packetized by breaking it into a sequence of fixed-length segments (packets). ACM Fellow Kleinrock has received many awards for his work, including the National Medal of Science, the highest honor for achievement in science bestowed by a U.S. president.

UCLA Professor and ACM Fellow George Varghese conducted a wide-ranging interview of Kleinrock, an edited version of which appears here.