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Leslie Lamport

American computer scientist and mathematician; developed LaTeX and distributed systems theory.

Last updated

He won the 2013 Turing Award for contributions to distributed and concurrent systems.[1][2]

Last updated 2026-10-07 from the source article.

Life and work

He worked at Massachusetts Computer Associates from 1970 to 1977, then SRI International until 1985.[3] Lamport joined Digital Equipment Corporation in 1985 and later Microsoft Research in 2001, retiring in January 2025.[3] He developed the LaTeX document preparation system starting in the early 1980s.[4] Addison-Wesley published Lamport's LaTeX user manual in 1986.[5][6]

Lamport introduced the temporal logic of actions (TLA) and the TLA+ specification language.[7] His book "Specifying Systems" describes TLA+ for specifying concurrent and reactive systems.[7][8] Lamport completed a B.S. in mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1960, and later earned an M.A. in 1963 and a Ph.D. in 1972 from Brandeis University.[9]

What the cited sources add

That same source notes the logical clock abstraction had an immediate impact on the field.[10] Lamport's personal writings page lists his 1978 paper "Time, Clocks and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System".[11] According to the PODC Influential Paper Award description, a paper by Lamport provided a precise characterization of causality in distributed systems.[10] The same writings page lists a paper from 1980, "Reaching Agreement in the Presence of Faults", which was co-written with Marshall Pease and Robert Shostak.[11]

References

  1. Wikipedia, "Leslie Lamport" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: "Leslie Barry Lamport - A.M. Turing Award Winner", amturing.acm.org, 2013 (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
  2. Wikipedia, "Leslie Lamport" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: "Turing award 2013", ACM; Newport, "A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload", Portfolio / Penguin, 2021, p. 81, 273 (we also read that source) en.wikipedia.org
  3. Wikipedia, "Leslie Lamport" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Lamport, "My Writings", 2006-12-19; "Leslie Lamport's Home Page", www.lamport.org (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
  4. Wikipedia, "Leslie Lamport" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Lamport, "How (LA)TEX changed the face of Mathematics"; "The Writings of Leslie Lamport", lamport.azurewebsites.net (we also read that source) en.wikipedia.org
  5. Wikipedia, "Leslie Lamport" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: "The Writings of Leslie Lamport", lamport.azurewebsites.net; "TeX, LaTeX, and AMS-LaTeX", 1998-12-03 (we also read that source) en.wikipedia.org
  6. Open Library record, ISBN 9780201157901 ("LATEX"). CC0 (metadata); book content not read. openlibrary.org
  7. Wikipedia, "Leslie Lamport" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Lamport, "A Temporal Logic of Actions", 1990-04-01; Lamport, "The Temporal Logic of Actions", ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems, May 1994, p. 872–923; Lamport, "Specifying Systems: The TLA<sup>+</sup> Language and Tools for Hardware and Software Engineers", Addison-Wesley, 2002; "The International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks keynote speaker biography" (we also read that source) en.wikipedia.org
  8. Open Library record, ISBN 9780321143068 ("Specifying Systems"). CC0 (metadata); book content not read. openlibrary.org
  9. Wikipedia, "Leslie Lamport" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Lamport, "My Writings", 2006-12-19; Lamport, "The Analytic Cauchy Problem with Singular Data", 1972 (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
  10. Neiger, "PODC Influential Paper Award: 2000", 2003-01-23. facts only, no text reused. podc.org
  11. "The Writings of Leslie Lamport", lamport.azurewebsites.net. facts only, no text reused. lamport.azurewebsites.net

Each numbered sentence above was checked against the source it cites before publication. Sentences citing Wikipedia adapt text from the English Wikipedia article Leslie Lamport (contributors), used under CC BY-SA 4.0; this entry is available under the same licence. Other sources were used for facts only; no text or images are copied from them.

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Sources

Compiled from Wikipedia and the sources listed below. Text from Wikipedia is available under CC BY-SA 4.0; this entry is adapted from it.

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