Eric Brewer (scientist)

Eric Allen Brewer is the main inventor of a wireless networking scheme called WiLDNet which promises to bring low-cost connectivity to rural areas of the developing world. He is a tenured professor of Computer Science at UC Berkeley. In 1996, Brewer co-founded Inktomi Corporation (bought by Yahoo! in 2003). Working with Bill Clinton, he helped to create USA.gov, which launched in 2000. He is known for formulating the CAP Theorem about distributed network applications in the late 1990s. Starting in May 2011 he has been on a sabbatical at Google as VP of Infrastructure.

Brewer received a BS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) from UC Berkeley where he was a member of the Pi Lambda Phi fraternity. Later he earned an MS and PhD in EECS from MIT.

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.

In 2007, Brewer was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery "for the design of scalable, reliable internet services." That same year, he was also inducted into the National Academy of Engineering "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 2013, the ETH Zurich honored him with the title Dr. sc. tech. (honoris causa).