Career
Professionally, Lamport worked as a computer scientist at Massachusetts Computer Associates from 1970 to 1977, SRI International from 1977 to 1985, and Digital Equipment Corporation and Compaq from 1985 to 2001. In 2001 he joined Microsoft Research in Mountain View, California.
Lamport’s research contributions have laid the foundations of the theory of distributed systems. Among his most notable papers are
- “Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System”, which received the PODC Influential Paper Award in 2000,
- “How to Make a Multiprocessor Computer That Correctly Executes Multiprocess Programs”, which defined the notion of Sequential consistency,
- “The Byzantine Generals' Problem”,
- “Distributed Snapshots: Determining Global States of a Distributed System” and
- “The Part-Time Parliament”.
These papers relate to such concepts as logical clocks (and the happened-before relationship) and Byzantine failures. They are among the most cited papers in the field of computer science and describe algorithms to solve many fundamental problems in distributed systems, including:
- the Paxos algorithm for consensus,
- the bakery algorithm for mutual exclusion of multiple threads in a computer system that require the same resources at the same time and
- the snapshot algorithm for the determination of consistent global states.
Lamport is also known for his work on temporal logic, where he introduced the temporal logic of actions (TLA). Among his more recent contributions is TLA+, a logic for specifying and reasoning about concurrent and reactive systems, that he describes in the book “Specifying Systems: The TLA+ Language and Tools for Hardware and Software Engineers” and defines as a “quixotic attempt to overcome engineers' antipathy towards mathematics”.
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