Leslie Lamport

Leslie Lamport is an American computer scientist whose work established much of the theoretical foundation for distributed computing, the design of systems made up of many separate computers that must coordinate correctly even though messages between them can be delayed or lost. His 1978 paper on ordering events in distributed systems introduced what became known as Lamport timestamps, a method for establishing a consistent logical ordering of events across separate machines with no shared clock, and he later formulated the Byzantine Generals Problem, a foundational way of describing how a distributed system can reach reliable agreement even if some of its components fail or behave unpredictably. Lamport also devised the Paxos family of consensus algorithms, which let a distributed system agree on a single value despite failures and became widely used in the design of large-scale reliable computing systems. Separately from his distributed systems work, Lamport created the LaTeX typesetting system in the early 1980s, built on top of Donald Knuth's TeX, adding higher-level document formatting commands that made TeX far easier to use and that remains widely used for scientific and mathematical publishing. He received the Turing Award in 2013 for fundamental contributions to the theory and practice of distributed and concurrent systems.