Santa Fe Institute

Bio

Dan Lynch used to be found walking in vineyards in dusty loafers, with a pair of clippers in his back pocket and a refractometer close at hand. Dan's a plant guy ("They stay where you put them and generally respond to love," he quips) and has been ever since growing up east of Los Angeles and accumulating one of the largest cactus collections in North America. The plants took up his family's whole back yard and earned Dan a back-hall pass at the famous botanical gardens at the Huntington Library near Pasadena.

As committed as he was to the collection, he displayed characteristic decisiveness in letting it go. "When your mind's made up, do it, darn it," he says articulating a cornerstone of his life philosophy, and when he left home to attend Loyola University in Los Angeles, he donated his collection to Claremont College and never looked back. "I just couldn't get it into my head to start again," he says. "But who knows, maybe when I'm old I'll become a crazy cactophile again."

He intended to study botanical pathology at university and become a plant doctor, but that major didn't exist, so he decided to sign up for pre-med and take the hard sciences he'd need. Impulsively, to avoid a long line to register for pre-med, he moved to the nearly empty line for mathematics and majored in that instead. After graduating, he "fell into computer programming and ended up working with the people who would create the Internet."

He is a founder of CyberCash, Inc.. He also founded Interop Company, which is now a division of Key3Media. As a member of ACM and ISOC, Lynch is active in computer networking with a primary focus in promoting the spread of the Internet. Lynch is also a member of the Board of Trustees of the Santa Fe Institute, and the Bionomics Institute. Dan is a private investor in a number of startup companies in the Internet arena, including, Sana Security, Covad (COVD), Maxager, Infoseek (DIS), InfoSpace (INSP), Polska Online, and Women.com (IVIL).

As Director of Information Processing Division for the Information Sciences Institute in Marina del Rey (USC-ISI) Lynch led the Arpanet team that made the transition from the original NCP protocols to the current TCP/IP based protocols. He directed this effort from 1980 until 1983.

He was Director of Computing Facilities at SRI International in the mid to late 70's. He formerly served as manager of the computing laboratory for the Artificial Intelligence Center at SRI , which conducts research in robotics, vision, speech understanding, automatic theorem proving and distributed databases. While at SRI he performed initial debugging of the TCP/IP protocols in conjunction with Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN).

Lynch received undergraduate training in mathematics and philosophy from Loyola Marymount University and obtained a Master's Degree in mathematics from UCLA .