Dr Lynda White, department of mathematics,  and Margaret Cunningham, department of computing, receive a £15,000 cheque from Graham Turner and Andrew Glasspool of Farncombe Technology Ltd

The Donald Davies Memorial Prize will be divided into £1,000 payments and awarded annually to a student of the joint honours course in mathematics and computing who produces the best final year project. It is funded by Farncombe Technology Ltd, a consultancy company, which specialises in telecommunications and technical management and worked with Donald prior to his death in 2000.

Donald graduated twice from Imperial and initially achieved a first class honours degree in physics at the age of 19, gaining another first in mathematics in 1947. Following graduation, he joined the National Physics Laboratory as a member of a team headed by Alan Turing.

He was involved in work on the Pilot ACE computer, one of the first electronic stored-program computers in the world. As computer technology evolved, he worked with industrial application, specifically developing a road traffic simulator and a computer which translated technical Russian into English.

By 1965, Donald had developed ‘packet switching’, a pioneering technique which enabled long messages to be split into chunks (packets) and sent from computer to computer. The origins of the internet as we know it today can be traced back to this early breakthrough.

This work was recognised by the British Computer Society, which awarded him the John Player Award in 1974, together with a distinguished fellowship a year later.

Diane and Michael Davies, wife and son of the late Donald, joined Andrew Glasspool and Graham Turner of Farncombe Technology when they visited the College to formally present the award to representatives of the departments of computing and mathematics.