Leslie Lamport

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Dr. Leslie Lamport (born 1941) is an American computer scientist.

Lamport, a graduate of the Bronx High School of Science, 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. The topic of his doctoral dissertation was singularities in analytic partial differential equations.

Professionally, he 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 in California.

Lamport's research contributions have laid the foundations of the theory of distributed systems. Among his most notable papers are the following four:

"Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System"
"Distributed snapshots: determining global states of distributed systems"
"The Byzantine Generals Problem"
"The Part-time Parliament"

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:

the Paxos algorithm for consensus
the bakery algorithm for mutual exclusion of multiple threads in a computer system that require the same resources at the same time.
the Snapshot algorithm for the determination of consistent global states.

In computer science, Dr. Lamport is best known for his work on temporal logic, introducing the Temporal Logic of Actions (TLA). 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 and defines as a "quixotic attempt to overcome engineers' antipathy towards mathematics".

Dr. Lamport received four honorary doctorates from European universities: University of Rennes and Christian Albrechts University of Kiel in 2003, EPFL in 2004, University of Lugano in 2006. In 2004 he also received the IEEE Piore Award because of his outstanding contributions in the field of information processing, in relation to computer science, deemed to have contributed significantly to the advancement of science and to the betterment of society.

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