Leslie Lamport

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Leslie Lamport

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

Lamport received a B.S. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in mathematics in 1960. He also earned M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Brandeis University in 1963 and 1972, both also in mathematics, the latter with a dissertation on singularities in analytic partial differential equations.

After graduation, he started his career as a computer scientist at Massachusetts Computer Associates, SRI International, Digital, and Compaq. In 2001 he joined Microsoft Research at Mountain View in California. Dr. Lamport's research contributions have laid the foundations of the theory of distributed systems. Among his most notable papers are the following three:

"Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System", see logical clocks
"Distributed snapshots: determining global states of distributed systems", see Snapshot algorithm
"The Byzantine Generals Problem", see Byzantine failure

which produced original and insightful concepts and, for this reason, are among the most cited papers in the field of distributed systems. In computer science, Dr. Lamport is best known for his work on temporal logic, introducing the Temporal Logic of Actions (TLA). He formulated the happened-before relationship relevant to logical clocks in distributed systems. Among his more recent contributions is TLA+, a logic for specifying and reasoning about concurrent and reactive systems, that he describes in the book and defines as a "quixotic attempt to overcome engineers' antipathy towards mathematics".

Among the algorithms he invented, some of the most important are:

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. (with Mani Chandy, the PDF can be downloaded from Lamport's website.)

Dr. Lamport received three honorary doctorates from three European Universities: University of Rennes and Christian Albrechts University of Kiel in 2003, EPFL in 2004. 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.

External links

[Leslie Lamport's home page]

Leslie Lamport's how-tos

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