Eric Brewer (scientist)

Eric Allen Brewer is professor emeritus of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley^[1] and vice-president of infrastructure at Google.^[2] His research interests include operating systems and distributed computing. He is known for formulating the CAP theorem about distributed network applications in the late 1990s.^[3]

Eric A. Brewer
Eric Brewer at TNW Conference 2015
Alma mater	Massachusetts Institute of Technology University of California, Berkeley
Known for	CAP theorem
Awards	ACM Fellow NAE Member
Scientific career
Fields	Computer science
Institutions	University of California, Berkeley Google
Thesis	Portable High-Performance Supercomputing: High-Level Platform-Dependent Optimization (1994)
Doctoral advisor	William E. "Bill" Weihl
Doctoral students	Nikita Borisov Ian Goldberg David A. Wagner Matt Welsh
Website	www.cs.berkeley.edu/~brewer/

In 1996, Brewer co-founded Inktomi Corporation (bought by Yahoo! in 2003) and became a paper billionaire during the dot-com bubble.^[4] Working with the United States federal government during the presidency of Bill Clinton, he helped to create USA.gov, which launched in 2000.^[5] His research also included a wireless networking scheme called WiLDNet, which promises to bring low-cost connectivity to rural areas of the developing world.^[6] He has worked at Google since 2011.^[7]

Education

Brewer received a Bachelor of Science in electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) from UC Berkeley where he was a member of the Pi Lambda Phi fraternity.^[8] Later he earned a Master of Science and PhD in EECS from MIT. He received tenure from UC Berkeley in 2000.^[9]

Awards

In 1999, he was named to the MIT Technology Review TR100 as one of the top 100 innovators in the world under the age of 35.^[10]

In 2007, Brewer was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery "for the design of scalable, reliable internet services."^[11][12] That same year, he was also inducted into the National Academy of Engineering "for the design of highly scalable internet services."^[13]

Brewer is the 2009 recipient^[14] of the ACM-Infosys Foundation Award in the Computing Sciences^[15] "for his contributions to the design and development of highly scalable Internet services."

In 2009, Brewer received the SIGOPS Mark Weiser Award.^[16]

In 2013, the ETH Zurich honored him with the title Dr. sc. tech. (honoris causa).^[17]