Leslie Lamport Quotes

Leslie B. Lamport is an American computer scientist and mathematician. Lamport is best known for his seminal work in distributed systems, and as the initial developer of the document preparation system LaTeX and the author of its first manual.Lamport was the winner of the 2013 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.



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✵ 7. February 1941
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Leslie Lamport: 4   quotes 0   likes

Famous Leslie Lamport Quotes

“With so many people doing so much writing, great writing is hard to find ... If you succeed in attaining a position that allows you to do something great, if you do something that really is great, and if you realize that it’s great, there’s still one more hurdle: You have to convince others that it’s great. This will require writing.”

As quoted in [Nathan, David E., Computer scientist Leslie Lamport to grads: If you can’t write, it won’t compute, https://www.brandeis.edu/now/2017/may/commencement-lamport.html, Brandeis University, 17 January 2020, May 21, 2017]

“Thinking doesn't guarantee that we won't make mistakes. But not thinking guarantees that we will.”

In [Lamport, Leslie, Why We Should Build Software Like We Build Houses, https://www.wired.com/2013/01/code-bugs-programming-why-we-need-specs/, Wired Magazine, 17 January 2020, January 25, 2013]

“I think in other things that I've done, I can look back and see: "This idea developed from something else."”

Sometimes it would lead back to a previous idea of mine, very often it would lead to something somebody else had done. But the Bakery algorithm just seemed to come out of thin air to me. There was nothing like it that preceded it, so perhaps that's why I'm proudest of it.

As quoted in [Dahlia Malkhi, Concurrency: The Works of Leslie Lamport, https://books.google.com/books?id=z_m2DwAAQBAJ, 16 September 2019, Association for Computing Machinery and Morgan & Claypool Publishers, 978-1-4503-7273-2, 137]

“A distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you didn't even know existed can render your own computer unusable.”

Email of 28 May 1987 https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/distributed-system.txt
As quoted in [Teresa K. Attwood, Stephen R. Pettifer, David Thorne, Bioinformatics Challenges at the Interface of Biology and Computer Science: Mind the Gap, https://books.google.com/books?id=_i-8DAAAQBAJ&pg=PA266, 26 September 2016, John Wiley & Sons, 978-0-470-03548-1, 266–]

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