Paul Baran

Distributed networks. At the RAND Corporation between 1960 and 1964 Baran worked out how a communications network could survive heavy damage: link many nodes in a mesh, cut each message into small blocks and let every block find its own route. The telephone monopoly dismissed the idea and it was not built at the time, but his reports were read by the ARPANET's designers and his analysis of redundancy still underpins network planning. He died in 2011.