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Leslie Lamport awarded Turing Award

360 points| rctay89 | 12 years ago |acm.org | reply

61 comments

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[+] Monkeyget|12 years ago|reply
Clock, 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...

[+] infruset|12 years ago|reply
Quote from that interview:

>Q: The Byzantine Generals Problem paper (1982) describes the first provably correct algorithm for making several computers agree when some of them may give deliberate wrong answers. What are the its practical applications?

>A: The only practical applications I know of are in real-time process control — in particular, for systems that fly airplanes.

I guess Bitcoin didn't exist at the time..

[+] ariwilson|12 years ago|reply
Mine as well. Reading his papers was always a pleasure as he has a knack for making the complicated accessible and interesting.
[+] scott_s|12 years ago|reply
What took so long? And, come on, you have to at least mention Latex.

edit: they do, on a more full citation: http://amturing.acm.org/award_winners/lamport_1205376.cfm

[+] bcantrill|12 years ago|reply
What took so long, indeed. As long as I have been associated with the ACM on behalf of the practitioner, I have complained about this to anyone and everyone. Many thought he had already won (!) and a few believed that he didn't deserve to win because he is "merely a popularizer" (!!), and some (rightfully, probably) encouraged me to inject myself in the process if I felt so strongly about it. There was no way I was going to do that, so I had resigned myself to a lifetime of merely complaining about it. I was elated to discover this morning that my complaining has been cut short, and that Lamport has won the award that is long overdue to him!
[+] amboar|12 years ago|reply
I actually thought "what's he done /this/ time?" before reading the announcement. Then wondered the same thing.
[+] hatred|12 years ago|reply
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

[+] jzelinskie|12 years ago|reply
Funny, it was only today that I learned about his contribution of LaTeX. I only knew about his distributed systems work.
[+] JoshTriplett|12 years ago|reply
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.

[+] robotresearcher|12 years ago|reply
"...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.

[+] donniezazen|12 years ago|reply
There is something intriguing about these old timers' plain text html websites. One of these days I am going to have to drop WordPress.
[+] teach|12 years ago|reply
My blog[0] is still plain HTML, but that's part of the reason I haven't made an update since late 2012(!).

Thinking about switching to a blogging platform myself. Or at least something that converts markdown to static HTML with git-commit hooks.

I guess what I'm trying to say is "Be careful what you wish for."

[0] http://grahammitchell.com/

[+] dr_faustus|12 years ago|reply
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!
[+] javert|12 years ago|reply
> achievement of Lamport that probably was important to lot more people

Not necessarily. We all use distributed systems that have been influenced by Lamport. It's just that we don't even think about it when we do it.

[+] rosche|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] avmich|12 years ago|reply
You think, if Noam Chomsky would receive the Turing award, they'll talk about his other achievements?
[+] curiousDog|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] derekchiang|12 years ago|reply
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

[+] kvb|12 years ago|reply
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...
[+] psuter|12 years ago|reply
Who are you thinking about who left MSR for Google?
[+] amaks|12 years ago|reply
Well deserved. His work on Paxos flavors worth it alone.
[+] general_failure|12 years ago|reply
I have to admit that I had no clue this man invented latex. But we studied Lamport clocks and lots of his papers on distributed systems.
[+] ChuckMcM|12 years ago|reply
This was very well deserved. Leslie has been one of my heroes ever since I came across his work while trying to write a functional lock manager for NFS. It was clear and very approachable.
[+] grondilu|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] pjscott|12 years ago|reply
Microsoft Research is one of the best CS research labs in the world.
[+] quarterwave|12 years ago|reply
A special mention must be made about the puns in the LaTeX book, like the letter sample written from Gnu York.
[+] dude_abides|12 years ago|reply
Wow I would have thought he won it in the 80s or 90s!
[+] suyash|12 years ago|reply
I think the follow to 'Hall of Fame' inductions style, recognize the contribution much later in the career or post-retirement.