Vinton Gray Cerf (; born June 23, 1943) is an American

Internet pioneer Instead of having a single "inventor", the Internet was developed by many people over many years. The following are some Internet pioneers who contributed to its early and ongoing development. These include early theoretical foundations, specifyi ...

and is recognized as one of " the fathers of the Internet", sharing this title with

TCP/IP The Internet protocol suite, commonly known as TCP/IP, is a framework for organizing the set of communication protocols used in the Internet and similar computer networks according to functional criteria. The foundational protocols in the suit ...

co-developer

Bob Kahn Robert Elliot Kahn (born December 23, 1938) is an American electrical engineer who, along with Vint Cerf, first proposed the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and the Internet Protocol (IP), the fundamental communication protocols at the hea ...

. He has received honorary degrees and awards that include the

National Medal of Technology The National Medal of Technology and Innovation (formerly the National Medal of Technology) is an honor granted by the President of the United States to American inventors and innovators who have made significant contributions to the development ...

, the

Turing Award The ACM A. M. Turing Award is an annual prize given by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for contributions of lasting and major technical importance to computer science. It is generally recognized as the highest distinction in comput ...

,Cerf wins Turing Award
February 16, 2005 the

Presidential Medal of Freedom The Presidential Medal of Freedom is the highest civilian award of the United States, along with the Congressional Gold Medal. It is an award bestowed by the president of the United States to recognize people who have made "an especially merit ...

,2005 Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients
from the White House website the

Marconi Prize The Marconi Prize is an annual award recognizing achievements and advancements made in field of communications (radio, mobile, wireless, telecommunications, data communications, networks, and Internet). The prize is awarded by the Marconi Society ...

, and membership in the

National Academy of Engineering The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) is an American nonprofit, non-governmental organization. The National Academy of Engineering is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of ...

Life and career

Vinton Gray Cerf was born in

New Haven, Connecticut New Haven is a city in the U.S. state of Connecticut. It is located on New Haven Harbor on the northern shore of Long Island Sound in New Haven County, Connecticut and is part of the New York City metropolitan area. With a population of 134 ...

on June 23, 1943, the son of Muriel (née Gray) and Vinton Thurston Cerf. Cerf attended

Van Nuys High School Van Nuys High School (VNHS) is a public high school in the Van Nuys district of Los Angeles, belonging to the Los Angeles Unified School District: District 2. The school is home to a Residential Program and three Magnet Programs—Math/Science, P ...

with Jon Postel and Steve Crocker. While in high school, Cerf worked at

Rocketdyne Rocketdyne was an American rocket engine design and production company headquartered in Canoga Park, in the western San Fernando Valley of suburban Los Angeles, in southern California. The Rocketdyne Division was founded by North American Avia ...

on the Apollo program and helped write statistical analysis software for the non-destructive tests of the F-1 engines. Cerf received a Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics from Stanford University. After college, Cerf worked at IBM as a systems engineer supporting

QUIKTRAN QUIKTRAN is a Fortran-like, interactive computer programming language A programming language is a system of notation for writing computer programs. Most programming languages are text-based formal languages, but they may also be graphical. ...

for two years. Cerf and his wife Sigrid both have hearing deficiencies; they met at a

hearing aid A hearing aid is a device designed to improve hearing by making sound audible to a person with hearing loss. Hearing aids are classified as medical devices in most countries, and regulated by the respective regulations. Small audio amplifiers s ...

agent's practice in the 1960s, which led him to becoming an advocate for accessibility. They would later join a Methodist church. He left IBM to attend graduate school at the

University of California, Los Angeles The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California. UCLA's academic roots were established in 1881 as a teachers college then known as the southern branch of the California S ...

, where he earned his M.S. degree in 1970 and his PhD in 1972. Cerf studied under Professor

Gerald Estrin Gerald Estrin (September 9, 1921 – March 29, 2012) was an American computer scientist, and professor at the UCLA Computer Science Department. He is known for his work on the organization of computer systems, on parallel processing and SARA ...

and worked in Professor

Leonard Kleinrock Leonard Kleinrock (born June 13, 1934) is an American computer scientist and a long-tenured professor at UCLA's Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science. In the early 1960s, Kleinrock pioneered the application of queueing theor ...

data packet In telecommunications and computer networking, a network packet is a formatted unit of data carried by a packet-switched network. A packet consists of control information and user data; the latter is also known as the '' payload''. Control inform ...

networking group that connected the first two nodes of the

ARPANET The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was the first wide-area packet-switched network with distributed control and one of the first networks to implement the TCP/IP protocol suite. Both technologies became the technical fou ...

, the first node on the Internet, and "contributed to a host-to-host protocol" for the ARPANET. While at

UCLA The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California. UCLA's academic roots were established in 1881 as a teachers college then known as the southern branch of the California ...

, Cerf met

, who was working on the ARPANET system architecture. Cerf wrote the first TCP protocol with

Yogen Dalal Instead of having a single "inventor", the Internet was developed by many people over many years. The following are some Internet pioneers who contributed to its early and ongoing development. These include early theoretical foundations, specifyi ...

and Carl Sunshine, called ''Specification of Internet Transmission Control Program'' (), published in December 1974. Cerf worked as

assistant professor Assistant Professor is an academic rank just below the rank of an associate professor used in universities or colleges, mainly in the United States and Canada. Overview This position is generally taken after earning a doctoral degree A docto ...

at Stanford University from 1972 to 1976 where he conducted research on packet network interconnection protocols and co-designed the DoD TCP/IP protocol suite with Kahn. Vinton Cerf-20070512

Cerf worked at the United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) from 1973 to 1982 and funded various groups to develop

, packet radio (

PRNET The Packet Radio Network (PRNET) was a set of early, experimental mobile ad hoc networks whose technologies evolved over time. It was funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). Major participants in the project included BBN Technol ...

), packet satellite (

SATNET SATNET, also known as the Atlantic Packet Satellite Network, was an early satellite network that formed an initial segment of the Internet. It was implemented by BBN Technologies under the direction of the Advanced Research Projects Agency. T ...

) and packet security technology. These efforts were rooted in the needs of the military. In the late 1980s, Cerf moved to MCI where he helped develop the first commercial email system (

MCI Mail MCI Mail was one of the first ever commercial email services in the United States and one of the largest telecommunication services in the world. Operated by MCI Communications Corp. from 1983 to 2003, MCI Mail offered its customers a low cost and ...

) to be connected to the Internet. Cerf is active in a number of global humanitarian organizations. Cerf is also known for his

sartorial {{Short pages monitor