Maurice Herlihy is best known for his work on practical and theoretical aspects of distributed computing. Most recently he has devised the Aleph toolkit--a collection of Java programs allowing work to be carried out across different platforms.

Maurice Peter Herlihy was born in 1954 and he was awarded an A.B. in Mathematics from Harvard in 1975. Although Herlihy studied mathematics in college, he was already interested in computers and he spent from 1975 to 1978 working at various programming jobs before returning to the academic life in 1978. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Herlihy undertook an M.S. in computer science, graduating in 1980; his thesis for this was on transmitting abstract values in messages. Remaining at MIT Herlihy continued his computer science studies and was awarded a Ph.D. in 1984. His thesis title for this study was Replication Methods for Abstract Data Types. During 1982 Herlihy had a summer research position...