Leslie Lamport

Leslie Lamport (born February 7, 1941 in New York City) is an American computer scientist. A graduate of the Bronx High School of Science, he received a B.S. in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1960, and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in mathematics from Brandeis University, respectively in 1963 and 1972. His dissertation was about singularities in analytic partial differential equations. Lamport is best known for his seminal work in distributed systems and as the initial developer of the document preparation system LaTeX.

Professionally, Lamport worked as a computer scientist at Massachusetts Computer Associates, SRI International, Digital Equipment Corporation, and Compaq. In 2001 he joined Microsoft Research at Mountain View, California.

Lamport is also known for his work on temporal logic, where he introduced the temporal logic of actions (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 “quixotic attempt to overcome engineers' antipathy towards mathematics”.

Lamport received four honorary doctorates from European universities: University of Rennes and Christian Albrechts University of Kiel in 2003, EPFL in 2004 and University of Lugano in 2006. In 2004, he received the IEEE Piore Award. In 2005, the paper “Reaching Agreement in the Presence of Faults” received the Dijkstra Prize.

Lamport is the author of the aphorism “A distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you didn't even know existed can render your own computer unusable.”