Computer Science Professor to Receive Laureate from the University of Bologna

Feb 9, 2005

By UCLA Samueli Newsroom

Kleinrock to receive honorary Laureate degree from oldest university in the Western world

Computer science professor Leonard Kleinrock will receive an honorary Laureate degree from the University of Bologna in Italy, the oldest university in the Western world. Kleinrock will become a Doctor of Internet Science at the graduation ceremonies on Tuesday, May 24, 2005.

Announcing the honor, Professor Lorenzo Donatiello, dean of the School of Sciences at the University of Bologna, said, “Leonard is an important figure for the development of science in the 20th century. His papers, and in particular his seminal research on packet technology, are still part of our technical culture. We are pleased to take this opportunity of honoring the Internet inventor.”

Previous Bologna Laureates include George Soros, William R. Hewlett, Francois Mitterand, Mother Teresa of Calcutta, Tsung-Dao Lee, who received the Nobel Prize for physics, and Guglielmo Marconi.

Kleinrock is well known for having created the basic principles of packet switching, the technology underpinning the Internet, while a graduate student at MIT. He wrote the first paper and published the first book on the subject; he also directed the transmission of the first message to pass over the Internet at UCLA in 1969.

He received his Ph.D. from MIT in 1963 and has been a professor of computer science at UCLA since then, serving as chairman of the department from 1991-1995. He has published more than 240 papers and authored six books on a wide array of subjects including queuing theory, packet switching networks, packet radio networks, local area networks, broadband networks, gigabit networks and nomadic computing.

Kleinrock is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the National Academy of Engineering, an IEEE fellow, an ACM fellow and a founding member of the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the National Research Council.

For more on his research, please visit http://www.lk.cs.ucla.edu/index.html.

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