Recent news from the University of Cambridge's Maths Faculty Insights:
In the late 1990s Christ's Fellow, Professor Frank Kelly, and his students developed a conceptual mathematical framework which elegantly described packet-switched networks, such as the internet. Their further work in the early 2000s helped show the generality and range of applicability of the conceptual framework in an era of rapidly growing communications capacity.
Subsequently, an international group of computer science researchers, involving a former PhD student of Kelly’s, Damon Wischik, translated Kelly’s pioneering work on routing traffic via multiple paths into a practical implementation: Multipath TCP (MPTCP).
MPTCP has had extensive reach and significant impact. To date, MPTCP has been deployed in over 1.38 billion Apple iPhones worldwide, and in 2020 was made a standard feature for 5G.
When asked about this Professor Kelly remarked that he is reminded of the beaver cartoon:
