Robert Kahn (computer scientist)

Co-inventor of TCP/IP, the Internet's core protocols.

Last updated 19 October 2026

Robert Elliot Kahn was born in December 1938 in Brooklyn, New York City to an Ashkenazi Jewish family.^[1] He is a recipient of the 2004 A. M. Turing Award with Vint Cerf for their work on TCP/IP.^[2]

Life and work

Kahn earned a bachelor's in electrical engineering from the City College of New York in 1960, then M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Princeton University in 1962 and 1964.^[3] At Princeton, he was advised by Bede Liu and completed a doctoral dissertation on sampling and modulation of signals.^[4] He first worked at Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc., where he was the principal designer of the ARPANET.^[5] In 1972 he moved to DARPA and subsequently became Director of DARPA's Information Processing Techniques Office.^[3]

While Director of IPTO he initiated the United States government's billion dollar Strategic Computing Program.^[3] Vint Cerf joined him in spring 1973, and together they completed an early version of TCP, later separated into TCP and IP.^[6] After thirteen years with DARPA, Kahn left to found CNRI in 1986.^[7] He coined the term National Information Infrastructure in the mid 1980s.^[3]

Kahn was inducted as a Fellow of the Computer History Museum in 2006 for pioneering technical contributions to internetworking.^[8]

What the cited sources add

The same source notes he coined the term National Information Infrastructure, later known as the Information Super Highway.^[3] That article also states Kahn initiated the Strategic Computing Program, costing over a billion dollars in the 1970s.^[9] A 2012 article from "Jew of the Week" states that Kahn and Vint Cerf, who together created TCP/IP, have been called "the Fathers of the Internet."^[9]

References

Wikipedia, "Robert Kahn (computer scientist)" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Perry, "Robert Kahn: The Great Interconnector", IEEE Spectrum, April 20, 2024; "Leaders in Technology, and Also Jewish | Jewish Reconstructionist Community"; "Jew of the Week: Bob Kahn - Jew of the Week", www.jewoftheweek.net, February 15, 2012; Oral History of Robert Kahn; Who's who in Frontiers of Science and Technology; "Paid Notice: Deaths Kahn, Lawrence" - New York Times (April 30, 1999). Retrieved on July 24, 2013. (we also read that source) en.wikipedia.org
Wikipedia, "Robert Kahn (computer scientist)" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: "Robert E Kahn - A.M. Turing Award Laureate", amturing.acm.org (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
"Robert E. Kahn", Corporation for National Research Initiatives. facts only, no text reused. cnri.reston.va.us
Wikipedia, "Robert Kahn (computer scientist)" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: "Bede Liu", Dean of the Faculty; Kahn, "Some problems in the sampling and modulation of signals", 1964 (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
Wikipedia, "Robert Kahn (computer scientist)" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Hafner, "Where wizards stay up late: the origins of the Internet", New York : Simon & Schuster, 1996, p. 116, 149; Pelkey, "Entrepreneurial Capitalism and Innovation: A History of Computer Communications 1968–1988"; Kahn, "Oral history interview with Robert E. Kahn", University Digital Conservancy, April 24, 1990 (we also read that source) en.wikipedia.org
Wikipedia, "Robert Kahn (computer scientist)" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Janet, "Inventing the Internet", MIT Press, 1999, p. 130 (we also read that source) en.wikipedia.org
Wikipedia, "Robert Kahn (computer scientist)" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: "About CNRI", CNRI, February 2022 (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
Wikipedia, "Robert Kahn (computer scientist)" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: CHM, "Robert Kahn — CHM Fellow Award Winner", April 3, 2015 (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
"Jew of the Week: Bob Kahn - Jew of the Week", www.jewoftheweek.net, February 15, 2012. facts only, no text reused. jewoftheweek.net

Each numbered sentence above was checked against the source it cites before publication. Sentences citing Wikipedia adapt text from the English Wikipedia article Robert Kahn (computer scientist) (contributors), used under CC BY-SA 4.0; this entry is available under the same licence. Other sources were used for facts only; no text or images are copied from them.