Back More
Salem Press

Table of Contents

See Also

Data Mining

Internet

Personal Computers

Encyclopedia of Mathematics & Society

Cerf, Vinton

by Bill Kte’ pi

Category: Communication and Computers.

Fields of Study: Fields of Study: Connections.

Summary: Computer Scientist Vinton Cerf helped create the Internet and continues to be a leader in Internet innovation.

Vinton Gray Cerf is an American computer scientist and is one of the creators of the Internet. He worked on Internet architecture and the design of TCP/IP protocols in the 1960s and 1970s, eventually moving from academia, to government, and to corporations like MCI and Yahoo. He continues to work in advancing Internet applications and policies, such as laws regarding “net neutrality.” He has won many prestigious awards in conjunction with collaborator Robert E. Kahn, including the U.S. National Medal of Technology, the Association for Computing Machinery’s Alan M. Turing Award (sometimes called the “Nobel Prize of Computer Science”), and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which is the highest civilian award given in the United States. In December 1994, he was also listed as one of People magazine’s “25 Most Intriguing People.” Cerf and his wife, Sigrid, have been married since 1966, and he has spoken of her support regarding his education and career. They have two sons, and, at times, his family’s needs have influenced where he has decided to work. Since 2005, he has been a vice president at Google, and continues to be a leader in Internet innovation.

Reflecting on his own education, Cerf traced his interest in mathematics to primary school. He cited his fifth grade mathematics teacher as being an influential force. When Cerf complained of boredom with the standard curriculum, the teacher introduced him to more advanced mathematics. Cerf said, “I fell in love with algebra. It was wonderful.…Frankly, I liked the word problems the best because they were like little mystery stories.…I still love word problems. To this day, give me an algebra word problem, and I’ll have a great old time with it.” Outside the classroom, Cerf also enjoyed the camaraderie and challenge of his high school math club and mathematics competitions led by a young teacher named Florence Reese. Of the experience, he noted positively, “It would be weeks and weeks of just working problems, and then the morning of the event we’d all get up and have a big steak and egg breakfast at 7:00 in the morning.…You didn’t want to dull your brain with a lunch of any kind.” He went on to earn a B.S. in mathematics from Stanford University, then a M.S. and a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California, Los Angeles, along with multiple honorary doctoral degrees from universities around the world. Regarding his change of field from undergraduate to graduate school, Cerf said, “I had already figured out that I wasn’t going to be a world-class mathematician. I sort of broke my pick on Riemannian geometry.…” At the same time, he credited his education in geometry with developing his thinking skills, saying, “…I enjoyed the reasoning part of it, which is probably one of the reasons why I’ve enjoyed being a programmer, because you have to go through the same line of thinking.”

Vinton Cerf playing a game on the Computer History Museum’s PDP-1 computer from 1959.

ph_Cerf.jpg

(Wikimedia Commons)

As a graduate student, Cerf was part of Professor Leonard Kleinrock’s data packet networking group when they conducted the first connection tests and demonstrations of the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANet), one predecessor to today’s Internet. ARPANet was created as a joint project between MIT and the Defense Department’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). After earning his doctorate, Cerf returned to Stanford as an assistant professor from 1972 to 1976, where he continued to work on packet networking and worked with Robert E. Kahn—who was instrumental in ARPANet’s hardware design—to develop the TCP/IP protocol for the Department of Defense. Various protocols had to be developed to enable computers to communicate with one another. TCP/IP was a suite of two such protocols: the Transmission Control Protocol, used to exchange data; and the Internet Protocol, which handles routing and addressing. The early version of TCP/IP was introduced in Cerf and Kahn’s 1974 paper “A Protocol for Packet Network Interconnection,” published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE). In the twenty-first century, it continues to be the protocol that most Internet applications rely on, including e-mail, file transfer, and the World Wide Web.

Cerf left Stanford in 1976, to work for DARPA directly until 1982, roughly the dawn of the personal computer era, when he was hired as vice president of MCI Digital Information Services (which has since been acquired by Verizon Communications). Cerf oversaw the development of MCI Mail, the first commercial e-mail service, which was officially in service from 1983 to 2003. Messages over MCI Mail were sent over any standard telephone landline with the use of a modem and could be delivered to any other MCI Mail user, a telex, or an MCI Mail print site—an important option in days when access to a personal computer was often limited. Eventually, messages could be sent to any e-mail user regardless of his or her service, as well as to FAX dispatchers. He also led teams at MCI that developed Internet solutions for data, voice, and video transmissions. As the Internet became more widespread, he continued to be an advocate for its use and development. For example, from 1999 to 2000, he served on the board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, and some attribute the group’s survival to Cerf’s business prowess, technical knowledge, and ability to work with players at all levels of Internet governance. He has consulted with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to develop an Internet standard for planet-to-planet communication and testified before the U.S. Senate in favor of “net neutrality” as that has become an increasing concern of the twenty-first century.

In 2005, Google hired Cerf as vice president and “Chief Internet Evangelist,” which has given him a prominent platform from which to address issues from environmentalism, to artificial intelligence, to the imminent transformation of the television industry’s delivery model. When asked about the process of innovation and where innovators like him get their ideas, Cerf said, “Part of it is being willing to think literally, out of the box.…The people I find most creative are also the ones who really know a lot about what they’re doing. They either know a lot of physics, or a lot of math.” In addition, he noted that “depth of understanding” means not only knowing the terms of a formula but being able to convey the intuitive meaning of the mathematics.

Further Reading

1 

Abbate, Janet. Inventing the Internet. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000.

2 

Morrow, Daniel. Computerworld Honors Program International Archives: Vinton G. Cerf Oral History. http://www.cwhonors.org/archives/histories/cerf.pdf.

Citation Types

Type
Format
MLA 9th
Kte’ pi, Bill. "Cerf, Vinton." Encyclopedia of Mathematics & Society, edited by Sarah J. Greenwald & Jill E. Thomley, Salem Press, 2011. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=Math_107636901076.
APA 7th
Kte’ pi, B. (2011). Cerf, Vinton. In S. J. Greenwald & J. E. Thomley (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Mathematics & Society. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Kte’ pi, Bill. "Cerf, Vinton." Edited by Sarah J. Greenwald & Jill E. Thomley. Encyclopedia of Mathematics & Society. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2011. Accessed December 14, 2025. online.salempress.com.