Tom Leighton

Frank Thomson Leighton, known as Tom (born 1956), is an American mathematician and computer scientist who is a professor of applied mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a member of its Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He took his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering at Princeton in 1978 and his doctorate in mathematics at MIT in 1981, advised by Gary Lee Miller. In 1998 he co-founded Akamai Technologies with Daniel Lewin and became its chief executive. He has published over 100 papers on algorithms, cryptography, parallel architectures, distributed computing, combinatorial optimization and graph theory, and holds patents on content delivery and internet protocols. His honours include the 2018 Marconi Prize, election as an ACM Fellow in 2018, induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2017 and the IEEE John von Neumann Medal in 2023.