Leslie Lamport awarded Turing Award • Hacker News Board

Re: Leslie Lamport awarded Turing Award

#11

Post by michael_nielsen » Tue, Mar 18, 2014, 3:43 PM UTC

I like that the full news release (http://www.acm.org/press-room/news-releases/2014/turing-awar... ) comes as both HTML and a PDF built with --- wait for it! --- LaTeX.

Re: Leslie Lamport awarded Turing Award

#12

Post by curiousDog » Tue, Mar 18, 2014, 3:50 PM UTC

About time too! This man is responsible for most of our progress in distributed systems. One of the few researchers Google hasn't poached from Microsoft yet.

Re: Leslie Lamport awarded Turing Award

#13

Post by cschmidt » Tue, Mar 18, 2014, 3:53 PM UTC

rosche wrote: post #7

dr_faustus wrote: post #4

While his work on distributed computing was certainly great, I find it curious that the press release doesn't even mention the achievement of Lamport that probably was important to lot more people: The creation of LaTeX. Sure, its not something typically honored by the Turing Award but leaving it out entirely? Come on!

Well, LaTeX is a (slight) improvement over TeX, which was written by D Knuth. I don't think that is what they would give a Turing Award to someone for.

Sure, but I saw the headline and though "Oh, the guy who wrote the LaTex book".

http://www.amazon.com/LaTeX-Document-Preparation-System-2nd/...

I imagine that is how he is best known. I didn't even know he did LaTex, just the book.

Re: Leslie Lamport awarded Turing Award

#14

Post by sriram_malhar » Tue, Mar 18, 2014, 4:04 PM UTC

Finally!

Re: Leslie Lamport awarded Turing Award

#15

Post by merloen » Tue, Mar 18, 2014, 4:09 PM UTC

This paper is a classic: Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System: http://www.ics.uci.edu/~cs230/reading/time.pdf

Re: Leslie Lamport awarded Turing Award

#16

Post by JoshTriplett » Tue, Mar 18, 2014, 4:21 PM UTC

As with Donald Knuth, it's hard to say whether his most high-impact contribution was to computing and algorithms or to typesetting; certainly the latter is even more widely used.

Well deserved for both.

Re: Leslie Lamport awarded Turing Award

#17

Post by ygra » Tue, Mar 18, 2014, 4:24 PM UTC

michael_nielsen wrote: post #11

I like that the full news release ( http://www.acm.org/press-room/news-releases/2014/turing-awar... ) comes as both HTML and a PDF built with --- wait for it! --- LaTeX.

If the HTML was built with LaTeX they should really rewrite that part.

Re: Leslie Lamport awarded Turing Award

#18

Post by derekchiang » Tue, Mar 18, 2014, 4:27 PM UTC

curiousDog wrote: post #12

About time too! This man is responsible for most of our progress in distributed systems. One of the few researchers Google hasn't poached from Microsoft yet.

Not sure why you seem to think researchers are flowing to Google. Microsoft Research is still the biggest name in distributed systems, if not CS in general. They have been consistently producing high-quality papers [1].

[1] http://jeffhuang.com/best_paper_awards.html

Re: Leslie Lamport awarded Turing Award

#19

Post by jeffreyrogers » Tue, Mar 18, 2014, 4:28 PM UTC

ygra wrote: post #17

michael_nielsen wrote: post #11

I like that the full news release ( http://www.acm.org/press-room/news-releases/2014/turing-awar... ) comes as both HTML and a PDF built with --- wait for it! --- LaTeX.

If the HTML was built with LaTeX they should really rewrite that part.

It currently says "PDF file generated with LaTeX".

Edit: Misread what you wrote. I think only the PDF was made using LaTeX, not the HTML.

Re: Leslie Lamport awarded Turing Award

#20

Post by hatred » Tue, Mar 18, 2014, 4:39 PM UTC

It's quite ironic that most of the world knows him for LaTeX and not for the zillion fundamental contributions he has made to Distributed Systems.

Truly well deserved. #Respect