Leslie Lamport

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Leslie Lamport
Leslie Lamport.jpg
Born (1941-02-07) February 7, 1941 (age 83)
New York City, New York
Fields Computer science
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Alma mater <templatestyles src="Plainlist/styles.css"/>
Thesis The analytic Cauchy problem with singular data (1972)
Doctoral advisor Richard Palais[1]
Known for <templatestyles src="Plainlist/styles.css"/>
Notable awards Dijkstra Prize (2000 and 2005)
IEEE Emanuel R. Piore Award (2004)
IEEE John von Neumann Medal (2008)
ACM Turing Award (2013)
ACM Fellow (2014)
Website
www.lamport.org

Leslie B. Lamport (born February 7, 1941) is an American computer scientist. Lamport is best known for his seminal work in distributed systems and as the initial developer of the document preparation system LaTeX.[2] Leslie Lamport was the winner of the 2013 Turing Award[3] for imposing clear, well-defined coherence on the seemingly chaotic behavior of distributed computing systems, in which several autonomous computers communicate with each other by passing messages. He devised important algorithms and developed formal modeling and verification protocols that improve the quality of real distributed systems. These contributions have resulted in improved correctness, performance, and reliability of computer systems.[4][5][6][7][8]

Early life and education

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.[9] His dissertation was about singularities in analytic partial differential equations.[10]

Career

Professionally, Lamport worked as a computer scientist at Massachusetts Computer Associates from 1970 to 1977, SRI International from 1977 to 1985, and Digital Equipment Corporation and Compaq from 1985 to 2001. In 2001 he joined Microsoft Research in Mountain View, California.[9]

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

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 computer science[16] 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).[17][18] Among his more recent contributions is TLA+, a language 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”[19] and defines as a “quixotic attempt to overcome engineers' antipathy towards mathematics”.[20]

Awards and memberships

Lamport received the 2013 ACM A.M. Turing Award for "fundamental contributions to the theory and practice of distributed and concurrent systems, notably the invention of concepts such as causality and logical clocks, safety and liveness, replicated state machines, and sequential consistency" in 2014.[21] He was elected to Fellow of ACM (2014).[22] He also received five honorary doctorates from European universities: University of Rennes and Christian Albrechts University of Kiel in 2003, EPFL in 2004, University of Lugano in 2006, and Nancy-Université in 2007.[9] In 2004, he received the IEEE Emanuel R. Piore Award.[23] In 2005, the paper “Reaching Agreement in the Presence of Faults”[24] received the Dijkstra Prize.[25] In honor of Lamport's sixtieth birthday, a lecture series was organised at the 20th Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC 2001).[26] In 2008, he received the IEEE John von Neumann Medal.[27] In 2011, he was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences.[28] He was named ACM Fellow[29] 2014 for fundamental contributions to the theory and practice of distributed and concurrent systems.

References

  1. ↑ Leslie Lamport at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  2. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  3. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  4. ↑ Leslie Lamport from the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Digital Library
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  6. ↑ List of publications from Microsoft Academic Search
  7. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  8. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 9.2 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  10. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  11. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  12. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  13. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  14. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  15. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  16. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  17. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  18. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  19. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  20. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  21. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  22. ↑ Leslie Lamport ACM Fellows 2014
  23. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  24. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  25. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  26. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  27. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  28. ↑ Members and Foreign Associates Elected, National Academy of Sciences, May 3, 2011.
  29. ↑ ACM Names Fellows for Innovations in Computing, Association for Computing Machinery, January 8, 2015.


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