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Leonard Kleinrock (born 1934) is a computer scientist who made several extremely important contributions to the field of computer networking, in particular to the theoretical side of computer networking.

His most well-known and significant work is his early work on queueing theory, which has applications in many fields, among them as a key mathematical background to packet switching, the basic technology behind the Internet. His initial contribution to this field was his doctoral thesis in 1962, published in book form in 1964; he later published several of the standard works on the subject.

He has described this work as:

"Basically, what I did for my PhD research in 1961-1962 was to establish a mathematical theory of packet networks ..."

His theoretical work on hierarchical routing, done in the late 1970s with his then-student Farouk Kamoun , is now critical to the operation of today's world-wide Internet.

He also played a significant role in the development of ARPANET; his laboratory in Boelter Hall at UCLA was the one of the first two nodes on the ARPANET (the other node was at SRI in Douglas Engelbart's lab).

1 Education and career

He received a B.E.E. in 1957 from the City College of New YorkCity College of New York was originally founded as the Free Academy of the City of New York in 1847. It was subsequently named the College of the City of New York but that name was later transferred to the complex of the municipally-owned colleges in New, and an M.S.E.E. in 1959Events January-February January 1 Cultivars of plants named after this date must be named in a modern language, not in Latin. January 1 Cuba: Fulgencio Batista flees Havana when forces of Fidel Castro advance January 2 CBS Radio cuts four soap operas: Bac and a Ph.D.E.E. in 1963Events January-March January 11 The Whisky A Go-Go night club in Los Angeles, the first disco in the USA, is opened. January 14 George Wallace becomes governor of Alabama. January 22 Elysee treaty between France and Germany January 28 Black student Harvey from MIT. He then joined the faculty at UCLA, where he has remained; during 1991-1995 he served as the Chairman of the Computer Science Department there.

He has received numerous professional awards.

2 Further reading

• Leonard Kleinrock, "Information Flow in Large Communication Nets", Ph.D. Thesis Proposal, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, July 1961
• Leonard Kleinrock, "Information Flow in Large Communication Nets", RLE Quarterly Progress Report, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, July 1961
• Leonard Kleinrock, "Information Flow in Large Communication Nets", RLE Quarterly Progress Report, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, April 1962

• Leonard Kleinrock, Communication Nets: Stochastic Message Flow and Design (McGraw-Hill, 1964)
• Leonard Kleinrock, Queueing Systems: Volume I - Theory (Wiley Interscience, New York, 1975)
• Leonard Kleinrock, Queueing Systems: Volume II - Computer Applications (Wiley Interscience, New York, 1976)

• Leonard Kleinrock, Farok Kamoun, "Hierarchical Routing for Large Networks, Performance Evaluation and Optimization", Computer Networks, Vol. 1, No. 3, pp. 155-174, January 1977