High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Radia Joy Perlman (born 1951 in Portsmouth, Virginia, USA) is a software designer and network engineer sometimes referred to as the "Mother of the Internet." She is most famous for her invention of the spanning-tree protocol (STP), which is fundamental to the operation of network bridges, while working for Digital Equipment Corporation. She also made large contributions to many other areas of network design and standardization, such as link-state protocols, including TRILL, which she invented to correct some of the shortcomings of spanning-trees. She obtained a Bachelor`s, Master`s in Mathematics, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from MIT. Her doctoral thesis at MIT addressed the issue of routing in the presence of malicious network failures.