David P. Reed

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For other persons of the same name, see David Reed.

David Patrick Reed
David P. Reed
Born	January 31, 1952 (1952-01-31) (age 56)
Residence	Needham, MA
Citizenship	United States
Fields	Computer Science
Institutions	Lotus Software MIT Hewlett-Packard Interval Research
Alma mater	MIT
Known for	TCP/IP UDP

David P. Reed (born January 31, 1952) is an American computer scientist, educated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, known for a number of significant contributions to computer networking.

He was heavily involved in the early development of TCP/IP, and was the designer of the User Datagram Protocol (UDP). He was also one of the authors of the original paper about the end-to-end principle, End-to-end arguments in system design, published in 1984.

He is also known for Reed's law, his assertion that the utility of large networks, particularly social networks, can scale exponentially with the size of the network. (It was first cited in "The Law of the Pack," Harvard Business Review (February 2001) pp 23-4.)

Dr. Reed is an Adjunct Professor at the MIT Media Lab in the Viral Communications group and is one of six principal architects of the Croquet project (along with Alan Kay, Julian Lombardi, Andreas Raab, David A. Smith, and Mark McCahill). He is also on the advisory board of TTI/Vanguard.