It’s Ada Lovelace Day!
“Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology.”
So, who am I going to write about? Well, I guess I’ll rehash a post from a while ago, about a beautiful little poem:
I think that I shall never see A graph more lovely than a tree. A tree whose crucial property Is loop-free connectivity. A tree which must be sure to span. So packets can reach every LAN. First the Root must be selected By ID it is elected. Least cost paths from Root are traced In the tree these paths are placed. A mesh is made by folks like me Then bridges find a spanning tree.
That “algorhyme” is from Radia Perlman’s paper “An Algorithm for Distributed Computation of a Spanning Tree in an Extended LAN” (PDF). Yep, that’s the algorithm that prevents havoc when you have a loop in your network – either through intentional redundancy, or if someone decides that plugging both ends of an Ethernet cable into the wall is a good idea 
Dr. Radia Perlman (by the way, that “Dr.” is a Ph.D. from MIT) also wrote some amazing books, holds an impressive number of patents, and received some of the most prestigious awards, including a USENIX Lifetime Achievement Award (and she’s even sometimes referred to as the “mother of the Internet”).
You can find out more about Radia Perlman in her bio at Sun Microsystems and her Wikipedia page.
More about Ada Lovelace Day:
