David Ross Cheriton (born March 29, 1951) is a Canadian-born computer science professor at Stanford University who has investments in technology companies. With an estimated net worth of US$1.8 billion (as of March 2011), Cheriton was ranked by Forbes as the 19th wealthiest Canadian and 692nd in the world.[1]
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Born in Vancouver, Cheriton attended public schools in the Highlands neighborhood of Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.[2] He briefly attended the University of Alberta, received his bachelor's degree from the University of British Columbia in 1973 and received his Masters and PhD degrees from the University of Waterloo in 1974 and 1978, respectively. He spent three years as an Assistant Professor at his alma mater, the University of British Columbia, before moving to Stanford in 1981.
Cheriton founded and led the Distributed Systems Group at Stanford University, which developed the V operating system.
One of Cheriton's notable publications, with Dale Skeen, is the paper "Understanding the limits of causally and totally ordered communication", presented at the ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles in 1993.[3]
Cheriton co-founded Granite Systems with Andy Bechtolsheim, a company developing gigabit Ethernet products, acquired by Cisco Systems in 1996. In August 1998, Stanford students Sergey Brin and Larry Page met with Bechtolsheim on Cheriton's front porch. Bechtolsheim wrote the first cheque to fund their company Google at the meeting, and Cheriton matched the investment.[4] He was also a co-founder, in 2001, of Bechtolsheim's next start up company, Kealia,[5] which was acquired by Sun Microsystems in 2004.
Later, David Cheriton co-founded (with Bechtolsheim) and was chief scientist of Arastra (now Arista Networks), a maker of 10 Gigabit Ethernet switches.[6][7] Cheriton is an investor in and advisory board member for frontline data warehouse company Aster Data Systems,[8] and founded OptumSoft.[9]
In 2003, Cheriton was presented with the SIGCOMM Lifetime Achievement award by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) "for his contributions in data networking and systems, and for his keen talent for questioning the assumptions behind all our work."[10]
Although the Google investment alone would be worth over US$1 billion, Cheriton has a reputation for a frugal lifestyle, avoiding expensive cars or large houses. He was once included in a list of "cheapskate billionaires".[11] On November 18, 2005, the University of Waterloo announced that Cheriton had donated $25 million to support graduate studies and research in its School of Computer Science. In recognition of his contribution, the school was renamed the "David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science."
On January 18, 2010, Cheriton donated $2 million to the University of British Columbia, which will go to fund the Carl Wieman Science Education Initiative (CWSEI).