Vinton Cerf, Robert Kahn, Sir Tim Berners Lee, Marc Andreessen, and Louis Pouzin were awarded the inaugural Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering today at the Royal Academy of Engineering. This new £1million global prize recognizes outstanding advances in engineering that have changed the world and benefited humanity – celebrating the best and also serving to illuminate the sheer excitement of modern engineering.
The work of these five pioneers is recognized as revolutionary for changing the way we communicate. According to the article:
Some 330 petabytes of data are estimated to be carried across its servers each year- that’s enough capacity to transfer every character ever written in every book ever published 20 times over…
In the same article, Vinton Cerf, and Robert Kahn are said to have:
provided the engineering insights that actually made the internet work. Their TCP/IP protocols define the way data travels around the internet.
The award is administered by a board of trustees, chaired by Lord Browne of Madingley who said that the group had “done an extraordinary service for humanity.” Queen Elizabeth will present the engineers with a trophy at Buckingham Palace in June.