Leslie B. Lamport (born February 7, 1941 in Brooklyn) 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 and the author of its first manual.[2] 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[edit]
Lamport was born into a Jewish family in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Benjamin and Hannah Lamport (née Lasser).[9] His father was an immigrant from Volkovisk in the Russian Empire (now Vawkavysk, Belarus)[10] and his mother was an immigrant from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, now southeastern Poland.
A graduate of Bronx High School of Science, Lamport received a B.S. in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1960, followed by M.A. (1963) and Ph.D. (1972) degrees in mathematics from Brandeis University.[11] His dissertation is about singularities in analytic partial differential equations.[12]
Career and research[edit]
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 California.[11]
Distributed systems[edit]
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",[5] which received the Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC) Influential Paper Award in 2000,[13]
- "How to Make a Multiprocessor Computer That Correctly Executes Multiprocess Programs",[14] which defined the notion of sequential consistency,
- "The Byzantine Generals' Problem",[15]
- "Distributed Snapshots: Determining Global States of a Distributed System"[16] and
- "The Part-Time Parliament".[17]
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,[18] 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 Chandy–Lamport algorithm for the determination of consistent global states (snapshot), and
- the Lamport signature, one of the prototypes of the digital signature.
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