Vviewpoints
P
H
O
T
O
B
Y
D
A
N
A
N
D
E
R
S
O
N
,
C
O
U
R
T
E
S
Y
O
F
E
L
O
N
U
N
I
V
E
R
S
I
T
Y
/
F
L
I
C
K
R
(
C
C
B
Y
-
N
D
2
.
0
)
Your unusual college story should in-
spire some Communications readers.
My father fell ill and could not continue to run his grocery store, so I realized I could not attend college in
day session and had no choice but to
go to night school and bring home a
salary by working full time during the
day. That was a big blow. My father
took me to an electronics firm where
I could get a job serving as an electronics technician and eventually as
an assistant electrical engineer doing
LEONARD KLEINROCK, DEVELOP- ER of the mathematical theory behind packet switching, has the unique distinction of hav- ing 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.
GEORGE VARGHESE: Do you remember any
epiphany as a boy that led you toward
communication?
LEONARD KLEINROCK: I remember early
in elementary school reading a
Superman comic whose centerfold showed
how to build a crystal radio out of
household items that one could find
on the street: a razor blade, some pencil lead, a toilet paper roll, and an earphone (which I stole from the telephone booth in the candy store down
the street). I also needed a variable capacitor and had no clue what that was,
but my mother, bless her heart, took
me to a store in the electronics section
of New York City, namely, Canal Street.
The clerk helped me select the right
part. Oh, the magic of listening to music from my newly built radio; and it
required no battery or power at all. After that, I kept cannibalizing old radios
and used the parts to design new radios
that I put together. My mother never
got in my way and allowed me a place
behind our sofa to make a mess and to
do my tinkering.
DOI: 10.1145/3363183
Interview
An Interview with
Leonard Kleinrock
The UCLA professor and networking pioneer
reflects on his career in industry and academia.
Leonard Kleinrock.
