Eric Allen Brewer is

professor Professor (commonly abbreviated as Prof.) is an academic rank at universities and other post-secondary education and research institutions in most countries. Literally, ''professor'' derives from Latin as a "person who professes". Professor ...

emeritus ''Emeritus'' (; female: ''emerita'') is an adjective used to designate a retired chair, professor, pastor, bishop, pope, director, president, prime minister, rabbi, emperor, or other person who has been "permitted to retain as an honorary title ...

computer science Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to practical disciplines (includin ...

at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

and vice-president of infrastructure at

Google Google LLC () is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company focusing on Search Engine, search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, software, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, ar ...

. His research interests include

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ef ...

s and

distributed computing A distributed system is a system whose components are located on different networked computers, which communicate and coordinate their actions by passing messages to one another from any system. Distributed computing is a field of computer sci ...

. He is known for formulating the CAP theorem about distributed network applications in the late 1990s. In 1996, Brewer co-founded Inktomi Corporation (bought by

Yahoo! Yahoo! (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web services provider. It is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California and operated by the namesake company Yahoo! Inc. (2017–present), Yahoo Inc., which is 90% owned by investment funds ma ...

in 2003) and became a paper

billionaire A billionaire is a person with a net worth of at least 1,000,000,000, one billion (1,000,000,000, i.e., a thousand million) units of a given currency, usually of a major currency such as the United States dollar, euro, or pound sterling. The ...

during the

dot-com bubble The dot-com bubble (dot-com boom, tech bubble, or the Internet bubble) was a stock market bubble in the late 1990s, a period of massive growth in the use and adoption of the Internet. Between 1995 and its peak in March 2000, the Nasdaq Comp ...

. Working with the United States federal government during the

presidency of Bill Clinton Bill Clinton's tenure as the 42nd president of the United States began with his first inauguration on January 20, 1993, and ended on January 20, 2001. Clinton, a Democrat from Arkansas, took office following a decisive election victory over ...

, he helped to create USA.gov, which launched in 2000. His research also included a

wireless networking A wireless network is a computer network that uses wireless data connections between network nodes. Wireless networking is a method by which homes, telecommunications networks and business installations avoid the costly process of introducing ...

scheme called WiLDNet, which promises to bring low-cost connectivity to rural areas of the

developing world A developing country is a sovereign state with a lesser developed industrial base and a lower Human Development Index (HDI) relative to other countries. However, this definition is not universally agreed upon. There is also no clear agree ...

. He has worked at Google since 2011.

Education

Brewer received a

Bachelor of Science A Bachelor of Science (BS, BSc, SB, or ScB; from the Latin ') is a bachelor's degree awarded for programs that generally last three to five years. The first university to admit a student to the degree of Bachelor of Science was the University o ...

in electrical engineering and

(EECS) from

UC Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public university, public land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of Californi ...

where he was a member of the Pi Lambda Phi fraternity.Membership Directory, 2010, Pi Lambda Phi Inc. Later he earned a

Master of Science A Master of Science ( la, Magisterii Scientiae; abbreviated MS, M.S., MSc, M.Sc., SM, S.M., ScM or Sc.M.) is a master's degree in the field of science awarded by universities in many countries or a person holding such a degree. In contrast ...

and

PhD PHD or PhD may refer to: * Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), an academic qualification Entertainment * '' PhD: Phantasy Degree'', a Korean comic series * ''Piled Higher and Deeper'', a web comic * Ph.D. (band), a 1980s British group ** Ph.D. (Ph.D. albu ...

in EECS from MIT. He received tenure from UC Berkeley in 2000.

Awards

In 1999, he was named to the MIT

Technology Review ''MIT Technology Review'' is a bimonthly magazine wholly owned by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and editorially independent of the university. It was founded in 1899 as ''The Technology Review'', and was re-launched without "The" in ...

TR100 as one of the top 100 innovators in the world under the age of 35. In 2007, Brewer was inducted as a

Fellow A fellow is a concept whose exact meaning depends on context. In learned or professional societies, it refers to a privileged member who is specially elected in recognition of their work and achievements. Within the context of higher education ...

of the

Association for Computing Machinery The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is a US-based international learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 and is the world's largest scientific and educational computing society. The ACM is a non-profit professional member ...

"for the design of scalable, reliable internet services." That same year, he was also inducted into the

National Academy of Engineering The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) is an American nonprofit, non-governmental organization. The National Academy of Engineering is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of ...

"for the design of highly scalable internet services." Brewer is the 2009 recipient of the ACM-Infosys Foundation Award in the Computing Sciences "for his contributions to the design and development of highly scalable Internet services." In 2009, Brewer received the SIGOPS Mark Weiser Award. In 2013, the

ETH Zurich (colloquially) , former_name = eidgenössische polytechnische Schule , image = ETHZ.JPG , image_size = , established = , type = Public , budget = CHF 1.896 billion (2021) , rector = Günther Dissertori , president = Joël Mesot , a ...

honored him with the title Dr. sc. tech. ().

References

External links

UC Berkeley websiteMore about the CAP Theorem
*Interview wit
Eric Brewer
on winning the ACM Infosys Foundation Award by

Stephen Ibaraki Stephen K. Ibaraki has been a teacher, an industry analyst, writer and consultant in the IT industry, and the former president of the Canadian Information Processing Society. Currently, Ibaraki is a venture capitalist, entrepreneur, futurist and ...

* * Docker conference 201
Dockercon14 keynotePodcast interview
with Eric Brewer on the CAP theorem
Inktomi's Wild Ride - A Personal View of the Internet Bubble
{{DEFAULTSORT:Brewer, Eric Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery MIT School of Engineering alumni UC Berkeley College of Engineering alumni Living people Google employees Year of birth missing (living people) UC Berkeley College of Engineering faculty Recipients of the ACM Prize in Computing Researchers in distributed computing Members of the United States National Academy of Engineering Berkeley Macintosh Users Group members