I'm confused. Is he the Leslie Lamport I'm thinking of, the one who created LaTeX? If so, I'm very surprised to learn that he works for Microsoft.
Leslie Lamport awarded Turing Award
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Re: Leslie Lamport awarded Turing Award
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Perhaps in terms of quantity, but to many he is the man who single-handedly brought order to distributed systems. I was surprised he had not won a Turing award yet.
Re: Leslie Lamport awarded Turing Award
#43As 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.
"...certainly the latter is even more widely used"
There are lots of LaTeX users no doubt, but Lamport's work on the fundamentals of distributed systems informs the design all the large-scale systems relied on by billions of people.
Lamport's analysis of the limitations of time in distributed systems, and the Logical Clock construct to help with that is way more impactful than LaTeX.
Re: Leslie Lamport awarded Turing Award
#44Clock, Byzantine general, Paxos, LaTeX, program proof. My CS curriculum often crossed Leslie Lamport's path. Here is an interview he did a while ago which go trough his work : http://www.budiu.info/blog/2007/05/03/an-interview-with-lesl...
Mine as well. Reading his papers was always a pleasure as he has a knack for making the complicated accessible and interesting.
Re: Leslie Lamport awarded Turing Award
#45It'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
I first came across his name while researching hash trees, and this was related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamport_signature
Re: Leslie Lamport awarded Turing Award
#46This paper is a classic: Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System: http://www.ics.uci.edu/~cs230/reading/time.pdf
The above link is a summary to the paper. Here is the actual publication: http://cnlab.kaist.ac.kr/~ikjun/data/Course_work/CS642-Distr...
Re: Leslie Lamport awarded Turing Award
#47I'm confused. Is he the Leslie Lamport I'm thinking of, the one who created LaTeX? If so, I'm very surprised to learn that he works for Microsoft.
Microsoft Research is one of the best CS research labs in the world.
Re: Leslie Lamport awarded Turing Award
#48About 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.
Aren't there like 4 other Turing award winners at MSR that also somehow escaped poaching (and are there any at Google)? I think you may have the wrong idea about where researchers would prefer to work...
Re: Leslie Lamport awarded Turing Award
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interestingly, Brian Kerninghan and Christos Papadimitriou have not received the award yet.
I'm wondering if they've been considered. Other names that come to mind: Linus Torvalds Richard Stallman Guido van Rossum Simon Peyton Jones Andy Tanenbaum John Resig Tim Berners-Lee Satoshi Nakamoto
What contributions to computer science research has van Rossum, Stallman or Torvalds made? It's not an engineering award, it's a research award.
Re: Leslie Lamport awarded Turing Award
#50About 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.
Who are you thinking about who left MSR for Google?