Leslie Lamport

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Leslie Lamport
Leslie Lamport

Dr. Leslie Lamport (born 1941) is an American computer scientist. A graduate of the Bronx High School of Science, he received a B.S. in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1960, and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in mathematics from Brandeis University, respectively in 1963 and 1972.[1] His dissertation was about singularities in analytic partial differential equations.[2]

Professionally, Lamport worked as a computer scientist at Massachusetts Computer Associates, SRI International, Digital Equipment Corporation, and Compaq. In 2001 he joined Microsoft Research at Mountain View, California.[1]

Lamport’s research contributions have laid the foundations of the theory of distributed systems. Among his most notable papers are

  • “Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System”,[3] which received the PODC Influential Paper Award in 2000,[4]
  • “The Byzantine Generals Problem”,[5]
  • “Distributed Snapshots: Determining Global States of a Distributed System”[6] and
  • “The Part-Time Parliament”.[7]

These papers relate to such concepts as logical clocks (and the happened-before relationship) and Byzantine failures. They are among the most cited papers in the field of distributed systems[citation needed] and describe algorithms to solve many fundamental problems in distributed systems, including:

Lamport is also known for his work on temporal logic, where he introduced the Temporal Logic of Actions (TLA).[8][9] Among his more recent contributions is TLA+, a logic for specifying and reasoning about concurrent and reactive systems, that he describes in the book “Specifying Systems: The TLA+ Language and Tools for Hardware and Software Engineers”[10] and defines as a “quixotic attempt to overcome engineers’ antipathy towards mathematics”.[11]

Lamport received four honorary doctorates from European universities: University of Rennes and Christian Albrechts University of Kiel in 2003, EPFL in 2004 and University of Lugano in 2006.[1] In 2004, he received the IEEE Piore Award.[12] In 2005, the paper “Reaching Agreement in the Presence of Faults”[13] received the Dijkstra Prize.[14]

Outside of computer science, Lamport is best known as the initial developer of the document preparation system LaTeX.[15]

Lamport is credited as the author of the following aphorism: “you know you have a distributed system when the crash of a computer you’ve never heard of stops you from getting any work done.”[citation needed]

  1. ^ a b c Lamport, Leslie (2006-12-19). My Writings. Retrieved on 2007-02-02.
  2. ^ Leslie Lamport (1972). “The Analytic Cauchy Problem with Singular Data”. Retrieved on 2007-02-02.
  3. ^ Lamport, Leslie (July 1978). “Time, Clocks and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System”. Communications of the ACM 21 (7): 558–565. Retrieved on 2007-02-02. 
  4. ^ Neiger, Gil (2003-01-23). PODC Influential Paper Award: 2000. Retrieved on 2007-02-02.
  5. ^ Lamport, Leslie; Robert Shostak, Marshall Pease (July 1982). “The Byzantine Generals Problem”. ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems 4 (3): 382–401. Retrieved on 2007-02-02. 
  6. ^ Chandy, K. Mani; Leslie Lamport (February 1985). “Distributed Snapshots: Determining Global States of a Distributed System”. ACM Transactions on Computer Systems 3 (1): 63–75. Retrieved on 2007-02-02. 
  7. ^ Lamport, Leslie (May 1998). “The Part-Time Parliament”. ACM Transactions on Computer Systems 16 (2): 133–169. Retrieved on 2007-02-02. 
  8. ^ Leslie Lamport (1990-04-01). “A Temporal Logic of Actions”. Retrieved on 2007-02-02.
  9. ^ Lamport, Leslie (May 1994). “The Temporal Logic of Actions”. ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems 16 (3): 872–923. Retrieved on 2007-02-02. 
  10. ^ Lamport, Leslie (2002). Specifying Systems: The TLA+ Language and Tools for Hardware and Software Engineers. Addison-Wesley. ISBN 0-321-14306-X. Retrieved on 2007-02-02. 
  11. ^ [http://2004.dsn.org/keynote.html The International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks keynote speaker biography]. Retrieved on 2007-03-06.
  12. ^ IEEE Emanuel R. Piore Award Recipients. Retrieved on 2007-02-02.
  13. ^ Pease, Marshall; Robert Shostak, Leslie Lamport (April 1980). “Reaching Agreement in the Presence of Faults”. Journal of the Association for Computing Machinery 27 (2). Retrieved on 2007-02-02. 
  14. ^ Edsger W. Dijkstra Prize in Distributed Computing: 2005. Retrieved on 2007-02-02.
  15. ^ Lamport, Leslie (1986). LaTeX: A Document Preparation System. Addison-Wesley. Retrieved on 2007-02-02.

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