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Turing Award Goes To Distributed Computing Wrangler Leslie Lamport

Posted by Soulskill on from the and-the-alan-goes-to dept.

alphadogg writes "Leslie Lamport, a Microsoft Research principal, has been named the winner of the 2013 ACM A.M. Turing Award, frequently called the 'Nobel Prize in Computing.' The computer scientist was recognized by the Association for Computing Machinery 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.' His algorithms, models and verification systems have enabled distributed computer systems to play the key roles they're used in throughout the data center, security and cloud computing landscapes."

1 of 40 comments (clear)

  1. supercilious bastress by epine · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The man deserves it. He rocks. I've loved the precision of his engagement with fundamental assumptions since my first encounter with the Baker's algorithm.

    My Writings is a good time killer. One of my favorite passages is this one:

    Writing the proofs turned out to be much more difficult than I had expected. I worked very hard to make them as short and easy to understand as I could. So, I was rather annoyed when a referee said that the proofs seemed to have been written quickly and could be simplified with a little effort. In my replies to the reviews, I referred to that referee as a "supercilious bastard". Some time later, Nancy Lynch confessed to being that referee. She had by then written her own proofs of clock synchronization and realized how hard they were.

    They did a fair amount of work together, judging by all the other places her name appears.