Byzantine Generals co-boffin Lamport bags CompSci's 'Nobel prize'

Distributed systems researcher Leslie Lamport has been awarded the A.M. Turing award, computer science's equivalent to the Nobel Prize. The award for 2013 was given to Lamport "for imposing clear, well-defined coherence on the seemingly chaotic behavior of distributed computing systems." Another way of putting it is: no …

[Michael H.F. Wilkinson]

Well deserved!!

I'll raise a glass to him tonight, most likely a more distilled versio

[Mephistro]

This guy is a genius!

And also has got a sense of humour!

(For those of you, fellow commentards, that -like myself- missed the link in TFA :-)

[MondoMan]

Definitely a beer icon dude!

Reading through his pubs list (thanks for the link!), I am struck by the humor in his parenthetical descriptions of each publication or the circumstances of its creation. Academic IT in general seems to nurture more humorists than do fields such as biology, or perhaps it just doesn't frown on their work ...

[Hungry Sean]

Legend

In college, one of my friends focused on embedded and fault tolerant systems. In one of the graduate level classes he took, a student wrote up a paper walking through the math behind Lamport's Byzantine Generals paper. Apparently, the original is notoriously challenging, and the student's digest was sufficiently helpful to warrant publication on its own merits.

Have also heard that the support in Latex for the integral symbol was its own PhD for some student. Not sure if that's apocryphal or not, but certainly a great story.

Surprised it took this long for him to get the Turing award-- well deserved.

[Anonymous Coward]

Just me, or does that photo look like a poor photoshop?

Like the face has been poorly lassooed, and moved/rotated slightly?

Anon because way off topic. And well done to him.

[ratfox]

\section{Well done}

This was \emph{completely} deserved!

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh

I had no idea he was known for anything other than the ghastly LaTeX package ("All the inflexibility of Word with the complexity of TeX").

I hope his other stuff is better.

[Richard Taylor 2]

LaTeX

Well deserved but...

"Along with this, Lamport also helped develop LaTeX, the typesetting software and markup language used widely in the sciences,"

No - a set of macros, based on TeX, by Kn?th anyone?

[jimbo60]

Brilliant!

One of the few who has such mastery of his subject that he could break new ground and have fun with it at the same time. The original "Part Time Parliament" (Paxos) paper is full of humor that really helps teach the subject.

I had the opportunity to work with him on the idea and requirements that became Disk Paxos. I couldn't figure it out myself. I think he didn't even break a sweat coming up with that variant.

[jimbo60]

Re: Brilliant!

For further evidence of the great humor, go to his current pubs list and browse.

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/pubs/pubs.html

For a good sampling, look at [101], [176], [122], [60], [91]. The first four go together as two pairs and are best enjoyed that way :-).

[BlueGreen]

Good one, well deserved. Also well done particularly for the reg on pointing out his non-technical side (too easy for the person to be dwarfed in the media by their work, IYSWIM).

Nearest thing to too much wine ------------------------------>