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 the late Daniel Lewin in 1998. Leighton discovered a solution to free up web congestion using applied mathematics and distributed computing.

He is on leave as a professor of applied mathematics and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He received his B.S.E. in electrical engineering from Princeton University in 1978, and his Ph.D. in mathematics from MIT in 1981. His brother, David T. Leighton, is a full professor at the University of Notre Dame specializing in transport phenomena. Their 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).

Leighton has been on numerous government, industry, and academic advisory panels, including 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). Provided by Wikipedia