Turing Award winner Leslie Lamport

the Turing award is for making lasting contributions to the theory and practice of computer science and Leslie certainly has Leslie invented the theoretical foundation underneath distributed systems technology so the Internet is a distributed system so you like using the Internet you owe Leslie every time you access a modern computer today whether it's your desktop or even your cell phone over a network I can guarantee you you're using one of lamport's ideas it's unbelievable how what kind of reach Leslie has had on the entire world nowadays when we have machines with dozens of cores and and data centers with hundreds of thousands of computers in them this is just the way computing is done and Leslie showed us how to do it reliably anyone who uses the internet which is off a lot of people is depending on distributed systems those systems work because of Leslie anyone who has been a student in computer science has been touched by Leslie because if you've taken an operating systems course you've probably studied the bakery algorithm and that's Leslie's Alcala it's so simple when Leslie describes it that you cannot imagine how you didn't think of it yourself which is simultaneously wonderful and extremely frustrating Leslie is very unique in the sense that he can really prove to you mathematically the solution is correct and the yes neither can be applied at you very practical problems the algorithms that he designed which in many cases were not viewed as important at the time are now fundamental to the way we build web scale systems the systems that all of us use every day what Leslie's done with this language the TLA plus modeling language is to make that accessible to everyday engineers his work on distributed systems predated the rise of the internet as a force in the world by many years and being way actually really studied his paper on taxes and applied to the technology to build as a distributed system stat that we still use today I've gone back and read recently some of his papers and I still have not been able to exactly get inside his head and figure out what he was thinking when he when he came up with them what he did want to do is build something solid that people could count on for 40 years a hundred years whatever else I mean what he's God you know as a mathematical truth just as much true as two plus two is four I can think of any single person who's had a more profound impact on how we think about concurrent systems and making concurrent tasks perform correctly what Leslie has taught us probably more than anything else is the importance of keeping the mathematical principles the mathematical underpinnings of computing firmly in mind when you build systems he can take and analyze problems and construct mathematical proofs light a few people in the world can maybe you know five maybe ten I don't know not many I can't most people can't without less least innovations which in many cases were not appreciated in the instant we wouldn't have the computing environment that we have today Leslie congratulations on winning the ACM Turing award Microsoft is extremely proud to have you among us congratulations Leslie congratulations Leslie on this well-deserved exciting award congratulations Leslie I'm so proud of you congratulations Leslie congratulations Leslie congratulations Leslie congratulations Leslie it's well deserved and thank you for all your work this is such a deserving award for your really congratulation it's wonderful thing we're awfully glad it finally happened and now get on with your work you

Channel: Microsoft Research

Views: 8,047

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Microsoft Research (Organization), Leslie Lamport, Turing Award

Id: zxeFdEUdba4

Length: 4min 37sec (277 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 18 2014