Leslie B. Lamport (born February 7, 1941 in

Brooklyn Brooklyn () is a borough of New York City, coextensive with Kings County, in the U.S. state of New York. Kings County is the most populous county in the State of New York, and the second-most densely populated county in the United States, be ...

) is an American

computer scientist A computer scientist is a person who is trained in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation, as opposed to the hardware side on which computer engineers mainly focus (a ...

and

mathematician A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems. Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, structure, space, models, and change. History On ...

. Lamport is best known for his seminal work in distributed systems, and as the initial developer of the document preparation system

LaTeX Latex is an emulsion (stable dispersion) of polymer microparticles in water. Latexes are found in nature, but synthetic latexes are common as well. In nature, latex is found as a milky fluid found in 10% of all flowering plants (angiosperms ...

and the author of its first manual. Lamport was the winner of the 2013

Turing Award The ACM A. M. Turing Award is an annual prize given by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for contributions of lasting and major technical importance to computer science. It is generally recognized as the highest distinction in compu ...

for imposing clear, well-defined coherence on the seemingly chaotic behavior of

distributed computing A distributed system is a system whose components are located on different networked computers, which communicate and coordinate their actions by passing messages to one another from any system. Distributed computing is a field of computer sci ...

systems, in which several autonomous computers communicate with each other by passing messages. He devised important

algorithm In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm () is a finite sequence of rigorous instructions, typically used to solve a class of specific problems or to perform a computation. Algorithms are used as specifications for performing ...

s and developed

formal model In logic, mathematics, computer science, and linguistics, a formal language consists of words whose letters are taken from an alphabet and are well-formed according to a specific set of rules. The alphabet of a formal language consists of ...

ing and verification protocols that improve the quality of real distributed systems. These contributions have resulted in improved correctness, performance, and reliability of computer systems.

Early life and education

Lamport was born into a Jewish family in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Benjamin and Hannah Lamport (née Lasser). His father was an immigrant from Volkovisk in the

Russian Empire The Russian Empire was an empire and the final period of the Russian monarchy from 1721 to 1917, ruling across large parts of Eurasia. It succeeded the Tsardom of Russia following the Treaty of Nystad, which ended the Great Northern War ...

(now Vawkavysk,

Belarus Belarus,, , ; alternatively and formerly known as Byelorussia (from Russian ). officially the Republic of Belarus,; rus, Республика Беларусь, Respublika Belarus. is a landlocked country in Eastern Europe. It is bordered by ...

) and his mother was an immigrant from the

Austro-Hungarian Empire Austria-Hungary, often referred to as the Austro-Hungarian Empire,, the Dual Monarchy, or Austria, was a constitutional monarchy and great power in Central Europe between 1867 and 1918. It was formed with the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of ...

, now southeastern Poland. A graduate of

Bronx High School of Science The Bronx High School of Science, commonly called Bronx Science, is a public specialized high school in The Bronx in New York City. It is operated by the New York City Department of Education. Admission to Bronx Science involves passing the Sp ...

, Lamport received a B.S. in

mathematics Mathematics is an area of knowledge that includes the topics of numbers, formulas and related structures, shapes and the spaces in which they are contained, and quantities and their changes. These topics are represented in modern mathematics ...

from the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of th ...

in 1960, followed by M.A. (1963) and Ph.D. (1972) degrees in mathematics from

Brandeis University , mottoeng = "Truth even unto its innermost parts" , established = , type = Private research university , accreditation = NECHE , president = Ronald D. Liebowitz , p ...

. His dissertation is about singularities in analytic

partial differential equation In mathematics, a partial differential equation (PDE) is an equation which imposes relations between the various partial derivatives of a multivariable function. The function is often thought of as an "unknown" to be solved for, similarly to h ...

Career and research

Lamport worked as a computer scientist at Massachusetts Computer Associates from 1970 to 1977,

SRI International SRI International (SRI) is an American nonprofit scientific research institute and organization headquartered in Menlo Park, California. The trustees of Stanford University established SRI in 1946 as a center of innovation to support economic ...

from 1977 to 1985, and

Digital Equipment Corporation Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC ), using the trademark Digital, was a major American company in the computer industry from the 1960s to the 1990s. The company was co-founded by Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson in 1957. Olsen was president un ...

and

Compaq Compaq Computer Corporation (sometimes abbreviated to CQ prior to a 2007 rebranding) was an American information technology company founded in 1982 that developed, sold, and supported computers and related products and services. Compaq produced ...

from 1985 to 2001. In 2001 he joined

Microsoft Research Microsoft Research (MSR) is the research subsidiary of Microsoft. It was created in 1991 by Richard Rashid, Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold with the intent to advance state-of-the-art computing and solve difficult world problems through technolog ...

California California is a state in the Western United States, located along the Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the most populous U.S. state and the 3rd largest by area. It is also the m ...

Distributed systems

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", which received the Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC) Influential Paper Award in 2000, * "How to Make a Multiprocessor Computer That Correctly Executes Multiprocess Programs", which defined the notion of

sequential consistency Sequential consistency is a consistency model used in the domain of concurrent computing (e.g. in distributed shared memory, distributed transactions, etc.). It is the property that "... the result of any execution is the same as if the operati ...

, * " The Byzantine Generals' Problem", * "Distributed Snapshots: Determining Global States of a Distributed System" and * "The Part-Time Parliament". These papers relate to such concepts as logical clocks (and the '' happened-before'' relationship) and

Byzantine failure A Byzantine fault (also Byzantine generals problem, interactive consistency, source congruency, error avalanche, Byzantine agreement problem, and Byzantine failure) is a condition of a computer system, particularly distributed computing systems, ...

s. They are among the most cited papers in the field of computer science, and describe algorithms to solve many fundamental problems in distributed systems, including: * the Paxos algorithm for consensus, * the bakery algorithm for

mutual exclusion In computer science, mutual exclusion is a property of concurrency control, which is instituted for the purpose of preventing race conditions. It is the requirement that one thread of execution never enters a critical section while a concurren ...

of multiple threads in a computer system that require the same resources at the same time, * the

Chandy–Lamport algorithm The Chandy–Lamport algorithm is a snapshot algorithm that is used in distributed systems for recording a consistent global state of an asynchronous system. It was developed by and named after Leslie Lamport and K. Mani Chandy. Leslie Lamport, K. ...

for the determination of consistent global states (snapshot), and * the Lamport signature, one of the prototypes of the digital signature.

LaTeX

When

Donald Knuth Donald Ervin Knuth ( ; born January 10, 1938) is an American computer scientist, mathematician, and professor emeritus at Stanford University. He is the 1974 recipient of the ACM Turing Award, informally considered the Nobel Prize of computer sc ...

began issuing the early releases of TeX in the early 1980s, Lamport — due to his personal need of writing a book — also began working on a set of macros based on it, hoping that it would later become its standard macro package. This set of macros would later become known as

, for which Lamport would subsequently be approached in 1983 by Peter Gordon, an

Addison-Wesley Addison-Wesley is an American publisher of textbooks and computer literature. It is an imprint of Pearson PLC, a global publishing and education company. In addition to publishing books, Addison-Wesley also distributes its technical titles throug ...

editor, who proposed that Lamport turn its user manual into a book. In September 1984, Lamport released version 2.06a of the LaTeX macros, and in August 1985, LaTeX 2.09 — the last version of Lamport's LaTeX — would be released as well. Meanwhile, Addison-Wesley released Lamport's first LaTeX user manual, ''LaTeX: A Document Preparation System'', in 1986, which purportedly sold "more than a few hundred thousands" copies, and on August 21, 1989, at a TeX User Group meeting at

Stanford Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a Private university, private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. S ...

, Lamport would agree to turn over the maintenance and development of LaTeX to Frank Mittelbach, who, along with Chris Rowley and Rainer Schöpf, would form the LaTeX3 team, subsequently releasing LaTeX 2e, the current version of LaTeX, in 1994.

Temporal logic

Lamport is also known for his work on

temporal logic In logic, temporal logic is any system of rules and symbolism for representing, and reasoning about, propositions qualified in terms of time (for example, "I am ''always'' hungry", "I will ''eventually'' be hungry", or "I will be hungry ''until'' I ...

, where he introduced the

temporal logic of actions Temporal logic of actions (TLA) is a logic developed by Leslie Lamport, which combines temporal logic with a logic of actions. It is used to describe behaviours of concurrent and distributed systems. It is the logic underlying the specification ...

(TLA). Among his more recent contributions is TLA⁺, a language for specifying and reasoning about concurrent and reactive systems, which he describes in the book ''Specifying Systems: The TLA⁺ Language and Tools for Hardware and Software Engineers.'' He defines TLA+ as a " quixotic attempt to overcome engineers' antipathy towards mathematics".

Awards and honors

Lamport received the 2013

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. He was elected a member of the

National Academy of Engineering The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) is an American nonprofit, non-governmental organization. The National Academy of Engineering is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of ...

in 1991 for contributions to the theoretical foundations of concurrent and fault-tolerant computing. He was elected to Fellow of

Association for Computing Machinery The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is a US-based international learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 and is the world's largest scientific and educational computing society. The ACM is a non-profit professional member ...

for fundamental contributions to the theory and practice of distributed and concurrent systems in 2014. He also received five honorary doctorates from European universities:

University of Rennes The University of Rennes is a public research university which will be officially reconstituted on 1 January 2023 and located in the city of Rennes, in Upper Brittany, France. The University of Rennes has been divided for almost 50 years, be ...

and Christian Albrechts University of Kiel in 2003, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in 2004,

University of Lugano A university () is an institution of higher (or tertiary) education and research which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. Universities typically offer both undergraduate and postgraduate programs. In the United States, ...

in 2006, and

Nancy-Université Nancy-Université federated the three principal institutes of higher education of Nancy, France, Nancy, in Lorraine (region), Lorraine, France before their merger into the University of Lorraine: * Henri Poincaré University (UHP, also known as ...

in 2007. In 2004, he received the IEEE Emanuel R. Piore Award. In 2005, the paper "Reaching Agreement in the Presence of Faults" received the

Dijkstra Prize The Edsger W. Dijkstra Paper Prize in Distributed Computing is given for outstanding papers on the principles of distributed computing, whose significance and impact on the theory and/or practice of distributed computing has been evident for at le ...

. In honor of Lamport's sixtieth birthday, a lecture series was organized at the 20th

Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing The Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC) is an academic conference in the field of distributed computing organised annually by the Association for Computing Machinery (special interest groups SIGACT and SIGOPS). Scope and re ...

(PODC 2001). In 2008, he received the IEEE John von Neumann Medal. In 2011, he was elected to the

National Academy of Sciences The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the Nat ...

.Members and Foreign Associates Elected
, National Academy of Sciences, May 3, 2011.

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Lamport, Leslie American computer scientists 1941 births Living people Computer science writers Jewish American scientists Formal methods people Researchers in distributed computing Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences Dijkstra Prize laureates Turing Award laureates Digital Equipment Corporation people Microsoft employees SRI International people The Bronx High School of Science alumni Brandeis University alumni Massachusetts Institute of Technology School of Science alumni 20th-century American engineers 21st-century American engineers 20th-century American mathematicians 21st-century American mathematicians 20th-century American scientists 21st-century American scientists American people of Belarusian descent American people of Belarusian-Jewish descent American people of Austrian-Jewish descent American people of Polish-Jewish descent Mathematicians from New York (state)