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Leslie Lamport, a principal researcher at Microsoft Research’s Silicon Valley lab in Mountain View, has been awarded the 2013 A.M. Turing Award, a prestigious technical award often referred to as the Nobel Prize of the computing world.
Lamport, 73, will receive a $250,000 prize 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,” the award website reads. “He devised important algorithms and developed formal modeling and verification protocols that improve the quality of real distributed systems. These contributions have resulted in improved correctness, performance, and reliability of computer systems.”
His development of various algorithms and computing tools were also cited, including ones relating to security, cloud computing, embedded systems and database systems. He contributed to Byzantine Fault Tolerance, a tool to defend against “Byzantine failures,” or when a system fails in arbitrary, unpredictable ways. He also created TLA+, a language for writing Temporal Logic of Actions (TLA) applications, used by hardware and software engineers, as well as LaTeX, a document preparation system and document markup language that is the standard for publishing scientific or computing documents.
The award, created in 1966 by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), is named after Alan Mathison Turing, a 20th century British mathematician and computer scientist known for making critical advances in those fields.
A Microsoft release on the selection calls a paper Lamport wrote in 1978, “Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System,” “one of the most cited in the history of computer science.”
“This is well-deserved recognition for a remarkable scientist,” Microsoft CEO Bill Gates said in the release. “As a leader in defining many of the key concepts of distributed computing that enable today’s mission-critical computer systems, Leslie has done great things not just for the field of computer science, but also in helping make the world a safer place. Countless people around the world benefit from his work without ever hearing his name.”
Lamport’s career included positions at Menlo park-based SRI International and Digital Equipment Corporation (later Compaq Corporation) before he came to Microsoft in 2001. He’s also authored or co-authored nearly 150 publications on concurrent and distributed computing and their applications and received many prestigious awards. He graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics in 1960 and went on to Brandeis University to attain his master’s and doctoral degrees, also in mathematics.
“The Internet is based on distributed-systems technology, which is, in turn, based on a theoretical foundation invented by Leslie,” Bob Taylor, founder and manager of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center and then founder and manager of Digital Equipment Corp.’s Systems Research Center, said in the release. “So if you enjoy using the Internet, then you owe Leslie.”
Lamport is the fifth scientist from Microsoft Research to win the Turing Award. The others are Chuck Thacker (2009), Jim Gray (1998), Butler Lampson (1992) and Tony Hoare (1980).
ACM will officially present Lamport with the award at an annual banquet on June 21 in San Francisco.
Wow! this accomplishment is really impressive… even to a non-geek like me. Somehow I get how important this creation is. And as a woman I can say for sure that this geeky winner is a very very attractive fellow indeed. Congratulations Mr Lamport. Well done You.
I’ve actually known of this Turing Prize somehow and of the fellow whose name the prize has. It is indeed very prestigious.
Turning was one of the WW2 brit “code breakers” who strove to break the Nazi’s Enigma machine messages. Derek Jacobi played Turing in Breaking the Code 1996 which IMDb states:
“A biography of the English mathematician Alan Turing, who was one of the inventors of the digital computer and one of the key figures in the breaking of the Enigma code, used by the Germans to send secret orders to their U-boats in World War II. Turing was also a homosexual in Britain at a time when this was illegal, besides being a security risk.”
It is an amazing, multi-award winning film and if you’ve never seen it. Go to the library or to Netflix and rent it. Jacobi’s performance is unforgettable. We all owe Turing more than I can explain.