Leslie Lamport

Leslie B. Lamport is an American computer scientist and mathematician. Lamport is best known for his seminal work in distributed systems, and as the initial developer of the document preparation system LaTeX and the author of its first manual. Lamport worked as a computer scientist at Massachusetts Computer Associates from 1970 to 1977, Stanford Research Institute (SRI International) from 1977 to 1985, and Digital Equipment Corporation and Compaq from 1985 to 2001. In 2001 he joined Microsoft Research in California, and he retired in January 2025. Lamport was the winner of the 2013 Turing Award for imposing clear, well-defined coherence on the seemingly chaotic behavior of distributed computing systems, in which several autonomous computers communicate with each other by passing messages. He devised important algorithms and developed formal modelling and verification protocols that improve the quality of real distributed systems.