Eric A. Brewer

Brewer comprehends complex situations and arrives at fundamental insights that have broad societal implications. For example:The high value of new information technology for developing regions, also called Brewer’s Conjecture; How to do first rate computer science research while developing technology that really helps such disadvantaged people; The inherent incompatibility of Consistency, Availability, and Partition tolerance for distributed computing, also known as Brewer’s (other) Conjecture and the CAP theorem; and the excellent match of clusters to Internet services for scalability, cost, and availability, which pinoeered what we call "cloud computing" today.