In the secluded Russian city where Yury Polyanskiy grew up, all information about computer science came from the outside world. Visitors from distant Moscow would occasionally bring back the latest computer science magazines and software CDs to Polyanskiy’s high school for everyone to share.
One day while reading a borrowed PC World magazine in the mid-1990s, Polyanskiy learned about a futuristic concept: the World Wide Web.
Believing his city would never see such wonders of the internet, he and his friends built their own. Connecting an ethernet cable between two computers in separate high-rises, they could communicate back and forth. Soon, a handful of other kids asked to be connected to the makeshift network.
“It was a pretty challenging engineering problem,” recalls Polyanskiy, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, who recently earned tenure. “I don’t remember exactly how we did it, but it took us a whole day. You got a sense...
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