Leslie Lamport (born February 7, 1941 in
New York CityNew York is the most populous city in the United States, and the center of the New York metropolitan area, which is among the most populous urban areas in the world. A leading global city, New York exerts a powerful influence over worldwide commerce, finance, culture, fashion and entertainment...
) is an
AmericanThe United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
computer scientistComputer science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation, and of practical techniques for their implementation and application in computer systems. It is frequently described as the systematic study of algorithmic processes that create, describe and transform...
. A graduate of the
Bronx High School of ScienceThe Bronx High School of Science is a specialized New York City public high school. Founded in 1938, it is located in the Bedford Park section of the Bronx. Admission is by an exam open to all grade-eligible students in New York City, reportedly taken by more than 20,000 students annually...
, he received a
B.S.A bachelor's degree is usually an academic degree awarded for an undergraduate course or major that generally lasts for four years, but can range from two to six years depending on the region of the world...
in
mathematicsMathematics is the science and study of quantity, structure, space, and change. Mathematicians seek out patterns, formulate new conjectures, and establish truth by rigorous deduction from appropriately chosen axioms and definitions....
from the
Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyThe Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological research...
in 1960, and
M.A.A master's degree is an academic degree granted to individuals who have undergone study demonstrating a mastery or high-order overview of a specific field of study or area of professional practice...
and
Ph.D.Doctor of Philosophy, abbreviated PhD , for the Latin , meaning "teacher of philosophy", or alternatively, DPhil, for the equivalent , is an advanced academic degree awarded by universities...
degrees in mathematics from
Brandeis UniversityBrandeis University is a private research university with a liberal arts focus, located in Waltham, Massachusetts, United States. It is located in the southwestern corner of Waltham, nine miles west of Boston. The University has an enrollment of approximately 3,200 undergraduate and 2,100 graduate...
, respectively in 1963 and 1972. His dissertation was about singularities in analytic
partial differential equationIn mathematics, partial differential equations are a type of differential equation, i.e., a relation involving an unknown function of several independent variables and its partial derivatives with respect to those variables...
s. Lamport is best known for his seminal work in distributed systems and as the initial developer of the document preparation system
LaTeXLaTeX is a document markup language and document preparation system for the TeX typesetting program. Within the typesetting system, its name is styled as ....
.
Professionally, Lamport worked as a computer scientist at Massachusetts Computer Associates,
SRI InternationalSRI International, founded as Stanford Research Institute, is one of the world's largest contract research institutes. Based in the United States, the trustees of Stanford University established it in 1946 as a center of innovation to support economic development in the region. It was later...
,
Digital Equipment CorporationDigital Equipment Corporation was a pioneering American company in the computer industry. It is often referred to within the computing industry as DEC...
, and
CompaqCompaq Computer Corporation was an American personal computer company founded in 1982, and is now a brand name of Hewlett-Packard.The company was formed by Rod Canion, Jim Harris and Bill Murto — former Texas Instruments senior managers...
. In 2001 he joined
Microsoft ResearchMicrosoft Research is a division of Microsoft created in 1991 for researching various computer science topics and issues. It currently employs Turing Award winners C.A.R...
at
Mountain View, CaliforniaMountain View is a city in Santa Clara County, in the U.S. state of California. The city gets its name from the views of the Santa Cruz Mountains. As of the 2000 census, the city had a total population of 70,708.-Geography:...
.
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 PODC Influential Paper Award
The Edsger W. Dijkstra 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 least a decade...
in 2000,
- “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-beforeThe happened-before relation is a means of ordering events based on the causal relationship of pairs of events in a concurrent system, especially asynchronous distributed systems...
relationship) and Byzantine failures. 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
Paxos is a family of protocols for solving consensus in a network of unreliable processors.Consensus is the process of agreeing on one result among a group of participants...
for consensusConsensus is a problem in distributed computing that encapsulates the task of group agreement in the presence of faults.In particular, any process in the group may crash at any time...
,
- the bakery algorithm
Lamport's bakery algorithm is a computer algorithm devised by computer scientist Dr. Leslie Lamport, which is intended to improve the safety in the usage of shared resources among multiple threads by means of mutual exclusion....
for mutual exclusionMutual exclusion algorithms are used in concurrent programming to avoid the simultaneous use of a common resource, such as a global variable, by pieces of computer code called critical sections. A critical section is a piece of code where a process or thread accesses a common resource...
of multiple threads in a computer system that require the same resources at the same time and
- the snapshot algorithm for the determination of consistent global states.
Lamport is also known for his work on
temporal logicIn logic, the term temporal logic is used to describe any system of rules and symbolism for representing, and reasoning about, propositions qualified in terms of time. It is sometimes also used to refer to tense logic, a particular modal logic-based system of temporal logic introduced by Arthur...
, where he introduced the
temporal logic of actionsTemporal logic of actions is a logic developed by Leslie Lamport, which combines temporal logic with a logic of actions.It is used to describe behaviours of concurrent systems....
(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 “
quixoticQuixotism means engaging in foolish impracticality in pursuit of ideals ; especially : those ideals manifested by rash, lofty and romantic ideas; or extravagantly chivalrous action. It also serves to describe an idealism without regard to practicality...
attempt to overcome engineers' antipathy towards mathematics”.
Lamport received four honorary doctorates from European universities:
University of RennesThe University of Rennes 1 is one of the two main universities in the city of Rennes, France. It is under the Academy of Rennes. It specializes in science, technology, law, economy, management and philosophy. The University of Rennes 1 has been in existence since 1969, but its heritage stems back...
and
Christian Albrechts University of KielThe University of Kiel is a university in the city of Kiel, Germany. It was founded in 1665 as the Academia Holsatorum Chiloniensis by Christian Albert, Duke of Holstein-Gottorp and has approximately 23,000 students today...
in 2003, EPFL in 2004 and
University of LuganoUniversità della Svizzera italiana is a public university located in Lugano, Switzerland, founded in 1996...
in 2006. In 2004, he received the IEEE
PioreEmanuel Ruben Piore was a scientist and a manager of industrial research.Piore was born on 19 July, 1908 in Vilnius, Lithuania. In 1917, his family moved to the United States, and in 1924, Emanuel Piore became a naturalized citizen of the United States.Piore obtained an undergraduate and a Ph.D...
Award. In 2005, the paper “Reaching Agreement in the Presence of Faults” received the
Dijkstra PrizeThe Edsger W. Dijkstra 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 least a decade...
. In honor of Lamport's sixtieth birthday, a lecture series was organised at the 20th
Symposium on Principles of Distributed ComputingPODC, the ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing, is an academic conference in the field of distributed computing. PODC is organised annually, and it is sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery special interest groups SIGACT and SIGOPS.- Scope and related conferences :Work...
(PODC 2001).
Lamport is the author of the
aphorismThe word aphorism denotes an original thought, spoken or written in a laconic and easily memorable form....
:
See also
- Lamport signature - The Lamport one-time signature scheme is a method for constructing a digital signature.
- S/KEY
S/KEY is a one-time password system developed for authentication to Unix-like operating systems, especially from dumb terminals or untrusted public computers on which one does not want to type a long-term password. A user's real password is combined in an offline device with a short set of...
- a one-time password system sometimes referred to as Lamport's scheme
External links