The Man Who Revolutionized Computer Science With Math

Leslie Lamport revolutionized how computers talk to each other. The Turing Award-winning computer scientist pioneered the field of distributed systems, where multiple components on different networks coordinate to achieve a common objective. (Internet searches, cloud computing and artificial intelligence all involve orchestrating legions of powerful computing machines to work together.) In the early 1980s, Lamport also created LaTeX, a document preparation system that provides sophisticated ways to typeset complex formulas and format scientific documents. In 1989, Lamport invented Paxos, a “consensus algorithm” that allows multiple computers to execute complex tasks; without it, modern computing could not exist. He’s also brought more attention to a handful of problems, giving them distinctive names like the bakery algorithm and the Byzantine Generals Problem.