The scientist who created the World Wide Web, co-owner of the VinFuture Main Prize, has won the Turing Prize and is one of the 100 most important people of the 20th century.

Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee was born in London (England). His parents were mathematicians and together worked on the team that developed the Ferranti Mark 1, one of the first commercially built computers.

He studied at The Queen’s College, from 1973 to 1976, where he received a Bachelor’s degree in physics.

He was the one who proposed an information management system in March 1989. Around mid-November of the same year, he also performed the first successful communication of information via a hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) between a client and a server over the Internet.

Then the first website was built and released on August 6, 1991. The site explains what the World Wide Web is, how to find a browser, and how to set up a Web server.

In 1994, Mr. Berners-Lee founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

In December 2004, he accepted the Chair of Computer Science at the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton (UK). Mr. Berners-Lee distributed his ideas freely, without patent registration and without collecting royalties.

In 2004, Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for his pioneering work. He was once honored in Time magazine’s list of the 100 most important people of the 20th century.

In addition, he was also honored as the “Inventor of the World Wide Web” during the opening ceremony of the 2012 Summer Olympics, with a personal appearance with an old NeXT Computer at the London Olympic Stadium.

Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee received the 2016 Turing Prize “for inventing the World Wide Web, the first web browser and the underlying protocols and algorithms that enable the Web to scale”.

On the evening of December 20, Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee was awarded the VinFuture 2022 Main Prize with a value of 3 million USD along with 4 scientists with groundbreaking inventions in connecting global network technology.

In his acceptance speech, he shared: “I am honored to receive and share this Main Award with other professors. Thank you to the foundation and especially Mr. Pham Nhat Vuong and his wife, the committee and others in the fund.

I feel great these past few days. We build fiber optic technology to connect the internet and build the global network, to make the world a better place. Creativity between nations is connected, working together and this will solve many problems in the future.

Special thanks to the constant support from friends and colleagues as well as family, who have always supported me by my side. Thank you very much.”