The Writings of Leslie Lamport

Well now here go with the good coffee shop reading!

I actually read through all of these (the summaries, not the papers) in the process of writing the TLA+ wikipedia article. Some favorites:

* On the oft-misunderstood significance of the bakery algorithm: https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/pubs.html#bakery

* On submitting an algorithm with a bug in it, thus arousing interest in verifying concurrent algorithms (culminating decades later in the development of TLA+): https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/pubs.html#proving

* On how nobody has actually read his most famous paper (Time, Clocks...): https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/pubs.html#time-clocks

* Hanging out, drinking beer at Dijkstra's house: https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/pubs.html#new-approac...

* On creating the first (impractical) digital signature algorithm: https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/pubs.html#dig-sig

* A several-times-rejected paper which then became one of the most cited in the field of temporal logic: https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/pubs.html#sometime

* A lifelong source of fascination, the arbiter problem: https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/pubs.html#buridan

* The creation of LaTeX: https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/pubs.html#latex

* On presenting the first paxos paper in an Indiana Jones outfit, to widespread incomprehension: https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/pubs.html#lamport-pax...

I'll stop here because basically every single summary is fun and worth reading.

This page make me want to write some narratives about my own papers. Maybe I wouldn't release the narratives, but Lamport's page made me realize how much detail is lost to time. The context of the papers is interesting and maybe even relevant to the research.

Interesting how that makes me think of state in programming. Maybe theres a way to encapsulate state in these papers to capture as much as possible from the context.