F. Thomson Leighton

Frank Thomson "Tom" Leighton (born 1956) is an American mathematician who is the CEO of Akamai Technologies, the company he co-founded with Daniel Lewin in 1998, and a professor of applied mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He is a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT.

Early life and education Leighton's father was a U.S. Navy colleague and friend of Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, the father of naval nuclear propulsion and a founder of the Research Science Institute (RSI). His brother, David T. Leighton, is a professor at the University of Notre Dame specializing in transport phenomena.

He received his B.S.E. in electrical engineering from Princeton University in 1978, and his Ph.D. in mathematics from MIT in 1981.

Career Leighton discovered a solution to free up web congestion using applied mathematics and distributed computing.

Leighton worked on algorithms for network applications and has published over 100 papers on algorithms, cryptography, parallel architectures, distributed computing, combinatorial optimization, and graph theory. He also holds patents involving content delivery, Internet protocols, algorithms for networks, cryptography and digital rights management.

Leighton has the Presidential Informational Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC) and chaired its subcommittee on cybersecurity. He is on the board of trustees of the Society for Science & the Public (SSP) and of the Center for Excellence in Education (CEE), and he has participated in the Distinguished Lecture Series at CEE's flagship program for high school students, the Research Science Institute (RSI).

Awards and honors The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) awarded Leighton the John von Neumann Medal in 2023 for "fundamental contributions to algorithm design and their application to content delivery networks." In 2018, Leighton won the Marconi Prize from the Marconi Society for "his fundamental contributions to the technology and establishment of content delivery networks". He was elected as an ACM Fellow in 2018 for "his leadership in the establishment of content delivery networks, and his contributions to algorithm design". In 2017, Leighton and Lewin were inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, for Content Delivery Network methods. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences In 2012, Leighton became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society. In 2009, Leighton became a Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. In 2008, Leighton was appointed as a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences. In 2004, Leighton was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering for contributions to the design of networks and circuits and for technology for Web content delivery. In 2001, Leighton received the IEEE Computer Society Charles Babbage Award. In 1981, Leighton was named the first winner of the Machtey Award.

Personal life He is married to the MIT professor Bonnie Berger, American mathematician and computer scientist, and they have two children.

Books Mathematics for Computer Science (with Eric Lehman and Albert R. Meyer, 2010) Introduction to Parallel Algorithms and Architectures: Arrays, Trees, Hypercubes (Morgan Kaufmann, 1991). Complexity Issues in VLSI: Optimal layouts for the shuffle-exchange graph and other networks, (MIT Press, 1983).