Vint Cerf

Vint Cerf — ‘Father of the Internet’

Vint Cerf helped develop computer-networking technology that led directly to the creation of the modern Internet.

Cerf earned his undergraduate degree in mathematics from Stanford, where he joined the computer science and electrical engineering faculty in 1972. As an assistant professor at Stanford, he worked with his students and Robert Kahn of the U.S. Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to create Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), which determines how packets of data travel via the Internet. Today, TCP Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) is the foundation for all data traffic on the Internet, and Cerf and Kahn have been christened “the fathers of the Internet.”

Cerf left Stanford in 1976 to work at DARPA. He has been a leading advocate for the potential of the Internet. Since 2005, he has been vice president and chief internet evangelist at Google.