Leslie Lamport

Dr. Leslie Lamport's pioneering work has profoundly shaped the way we think about distributed systems today. His treatment of concurrency, which encompasses fault tolerance and distribution, can be applied to the design of almost any computer system. His work on a suite of widely used algorithms includes the groundbreaking general algorithm for Byzantine consensus and the Paxos algorithm for consensus in aynchronous systems with omission faults. His contributions to the verification of concurrent systems include introducing the concepts of safety and liveness in the late 1970s.

Dr. Lamport is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering and the author of about 100 publications including two books, 'Specifying Systems: The TLA+ Language and Tools for Hardware and Software Engineers' and 'LaTeX: A Document Preparation System.' He is a senior researcher at Microsoft Research's Silicon Valley laboratory
in Mountain View, California.