Talk:Radia Perlman

Foundational nature of her thesis

There is a request for a citation on the claim that "Her doctoral thesis at MIT addressed the issue of routing in the presence of malicious network failures and forms the basis for most of the work in this field."

I will confess that I'm always flummoxed as to exactly what sort of documentation one should cite for such a claim (which wasn't mine, mind you, though I do agree with it). Is it sufficient to cite one work such as the quote in "Communications and Multimedia Security. Advanced Techniques for Network and Data Protection: 7th IFIP TC-6 TC-11 International Conference, CMS 2003, Torino" (2003, ISBN: 978-3540201854), that "Any discussion of routing security must include a reference to the first significant treatment of the topic, Radia Perlman's thesis."

Does it help that when she was featured as MIT's "Inventor of the Week", their bio pf her contains the very same claim, that "her doctoral thesis on routing in environments where malicious network failures are present serves as the basis for much of the work that now exists in this area" as do a number of other other sites and proceedings bios?

I do not doubt the claim in the slightest, but I'm not certain what citations should be taken as demonstrating it. Brons (talk) 00:39, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

dead link

http://research.sun.com/people/mybio.php?uid=28941

^^ is 404 — Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.38.197.76 (talk) 23:43, 8 May 2013 (UTC)

It's been 9 years, but it's still in the Wayback Machine. Perhaps someone has replaced the link. A diehard editor (talk | edits) 15:26, 1 September 2022 (UTC)

Institutions: Intel?

I'm wondering why the "Institutions" entry in the box lists "Intel", but there is no mention of Intel anywhere else in the article? The article itself mentions plenty of other institutions. - Dough34 (talk) 18:04, 1 January 2019 (UTC)

Totally agree, and I wonder why 5 years later, this is still the case.

Additionally, the article misrepresents her as working for Oracle and obtaining 40 patents while working for Oracle. She worked for Sun, which was acquired by Oracle well after she had left - Oracle has nothing to do with her or her achievements, and neither does Intel. 142.113.235.119 (talk) 16:35, 5 March 2025 (UTC)

Contributions to ISIS

As anyone working on ISIS back in the 90's knows, Radia Perlman was the principal designer of IS-IS, yet the only credit she gets is relatively late additions such as supporting IPv4. True, the listed author for RFC1142 (copy of ISO 10589 draft) was her manager (and the text is probably his) but Perlman was the designer. According to https://datatracker.ietf.org/meeting/101/materials/slides-101-trill-trill-history-01, Perlman designed "DecNET Phase IV / ISIS". Is that a sufficient reference? Jlearman (talk) 21:38, 16 July 2020 (UTC)

Setting variant to American English

I have set the variant of English for this article to American English.

Reasons:

• Perlman is American.
• First significant revision uses American English (standardization).

Sincerely, A diehard editor (talk | edits) 15:52, 3 September 2022 (UTC)

confusion loops and branches

Current sentence in the article:

> Building and expanding bridged networks was difficult because loops, where more than one path leads to the same destination, could result in the collapse of the network.

There seems to be a confusion between cycles (topology) and loops (behaviour).

More than one path leading to the same destination is not a problem, it's a core feature of routing.

A path leading *back* to a host/graph node the packet already visited is a loop, and thus a problem. Sending duplicates (as the paragraph continues to explain), can be a problem too; but it is not a loop.

Is the quoted sentence indeed wrong and needs correction, or did I just miss a deeper meaning in it?

––Jwilkes (talk) 13:21, 23 February 2026 (UTC)