The CCC congratulates Leslie Lamport from Microsoft Research on receiving the 2013 ACM Turing Award for advances in reliability and consistency of computing systems.
The path to greatness begins with baby steps, and for Lamport, a principal researcher with Microsoft Research, that teenage curiosity has yet to be quenched. Over the ensuing decades, he has become a veritable legend in computing circles. His work in the theory of distributed computing is foundational. His 1978 paper Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System is one of the most cited in the history of computer science. And he has contributed core principles to the field of specification and verification of concurrent systems.
From the Turing Award website:
Leslie Lamport, a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research, has been named as the recipient of the 2013 ACM A.M. 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 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.
Click here to learn more about his contributions to computing.
The A.M. Turing Award, the ACM’s most prestigious technical award, is given for major contributions of lasting importance to computing. Recipients are invited to give the annual A.M. Turing Award Lecture. The award is also accompanied by a cash prize of $250,000, which in recent years has been underwritten by the Intel Corporation and Google, Inc.
