Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. 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, while working for Digital Equipment Corporation, which is fundamental to the operation of network bridges. 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 short-comings 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 and forms the basis for most of the work in this field.