Tom Leighton

Frank Thomson Leighton, known as Tom Leighton (born 1956), is an American mathematician and computer scientist who is a professor of applied mathematics at MIT and a member of its Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. In 1998 he co-founded Akamai Technologies, where he serves as chief executive officer, applying his research on algorithms, parallel architectures and distributed computing to build a system for delivering web content efficiently across congested networks. He earned a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Princeton University in 1978 and a PhD in mathematics from MIT in 1981. He received the IEEE John von Neumann Medal in 2023 for contributions to algorithm design and their application to content delivery networks, and the Marconi Prize in 2018.