You do the math. Tom Leighton, a professor at MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science, or LCS, holds nearly 10 million shares in Akamai Technologies, a company he co-founded in August 1998. Last October, Akamai went public, with prices at the initial public offering (IPO) starting off at $26 a share; by the end of the day, investors had bid the price up to $145 a share. A month later the stock was selling at $327 a share. No matter how much math anxiety you might have, you get the point-Tom Leighton had become a very rich man.

An academic whose expertise is in parallel algorithms and applied mathematics, Leighton is at first glance an unlikely candidate for an Internet tweeds-to-riches success story. But on closer examination, it makes perfect sense. For years, Leighton has been scrutinizing how complex networks operate-and how they can be optimized. So, five years ago, when Tim Berners-Lee (the inventor of the World Wide Web) came down the hall at LCS looking for ways to better manage the escalating traffic flow on the Internet, Leighton and his crew of graduate students were an obvious place to drop in.