Vint Cerf
Hard of hearing since childhood, he co-wrote the rules that let every computer on earth talk to each other
Vinton Cerf was born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1943 and has worn hearing aids since he was thirteen. He has said that this shaped his interest in written electronic messages, because a conversation on the telephone was always hard work and a line of text on a screen was not. His wife, Sigrid, was profoundly deaf for most of her life until a cochlear implant in her fifties.
He studied mathematics at Stanford, then went to UCLA, where he worked on the ARPANET, the experimental network paid for by the American defence department. It connected a handful of universities and worked, but it was one network with one set of rules. Radio and satellite networks were being built that could not talk to it.
In 1973 Cerf and Robert Kahn sat down to design a way for any network to exchange packets of data with any other. They published the idea in 1974. The result, TCP/IP, treats every network as equal and asks nothing of it except that it pass packets along. It was adopted across the ARPANET on 1 January 1983, and the network of networks that grew from it became the internet.
Cerf spent years on the unglamorous work of standards committees and government funding. He later built the first commercial email service at MCI, and since 2005 has worked at Google. He is known for three-piece suits and for patient, plain explanation. He and Kahn shared the Turing Award in 2004.