Heartwarming

The colloquium speaker this week was Tom Leighton, an applied math professor from MIT who founded Akamai in the late 90s. Akamai now serves something like 20% of the web’s traffic and is worth on the order of $5 billion. The neat thing was that Leighton works in the Theory group at MIT. People often say that theoretical computer science is of no use in the real world, but Akamai’s techniques (based on consistent hashing, among other things) have certainly made a difference!

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