If you have used LaTeX, you may know that the prefix "La" in the project name stands for "Lamport" in honor of the developer of this set of macro extensions for TeX. However, Leslie Lamport is not only famous for his contribution to the development of computer layout systems.
Leslie Lamport was born on 7 February 1941 in Brooklyn. His father was born in the Russian Empire, in the town of Volkovysk (now the Republic of Belarus), and his mother was a native of Austria-Hungary (now her hometown is located in Poland). Leslie graduated from high school in the Bronx, and then went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he received successive Bachelor's and Master's degrees in mathematics, and later received a Ph.D. from Brandeis University.
Still a graduate student, Leslie took a job at Massachusetts Computer Associates as an information technology researcher. It was there that the young mathematical scientist developed an interest in computers that he carried through his life.
In 1977, Leslie Lamport joined Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), where he was first introduced to TeX, an electronic document layout system developed by Donald Erwin Knuth in 1978. Knuth created TeX primarily because he was not satisfied with the layout quality of his own books. The technology he proposed for preparing publication layouts was revolutionary for its time, and it was soon adopted not only by Addison-Wesley but also by major university publishers such as Cambridge University Press and Oxford University Press.
The distinctive features of TeX are its open source and cross-platform nature. Platform independence ensures that documents created with TeX can be reproduced in the same way in different operating systems and on different hardware. And free access to the source code has made it easier for developers to improve this technology. TeX has a powerful language of macros that can be used to define custom commands and styles. This extensibility allows you to create documents with specific formatting and automate repetitive tasks.
At DEC Lamport had to edit and write significant amounts of documentation, primarily manuals that simplify program design and algorithm descriptions. So he found TeX, which was widely used for layout, to be an extremely useful tool, although not entirely user-friendly. Leslie set about creating macros to extend and supplement the standard TeX features, primarily in an attempt to solve his own problems. He wanted to simplify the layout of documents so that users could concentrate on the content without having to delve into the intricacies of formatting. This is how LaTeX was born.
The LaTeX philosophy is based on the idea of "What You See Is What You Mean" (WYSIWYM), as opposed to the more common "What You See Is What You Get" (WYSIWYG) approach. This distinction allows users to focus on the meaning of the content, leaving the details of the presentation to the system. Users compose documents from plain text by inserting commands that define structure and formatting styles. This approach not only simplifies the writing process but also ensures that the entire document is consistent and coherent.
LaTex can be used to create various types of documents, from scientific articles and dissertations to presentations and CVs. The technology is available to users of different levels: beginners can use a basic set of commands for standard formatting, while more experienced users can use a wide range of tools to customize documents to their needs. The source code of the system is freely available, which makes it possible to create various ready-made templates and applications for LaTex to facilitate the process of formatting and editing files. Almost any text editor can be used for LaTeX layout, although many specialized programs make layout much easier.
Initially, Leslie Lamport did not plan to present his project to the general public, but Addison-Wesley editor Peter Gordon persuaded him to write a detailed guide to the practical use of LaTex. This was the starting point of LaTex's growing popularity not only in North America but around the world. The book LaTeX: A Document Preparation System was published in 1986 and quickly became an international bestseller, and the technology rapidly became one of the most widely used standards for electronic documentation, becoming an important tool for scientists, mathematicians, and technical writers.
On 21 August 1989, Lamport transferred the rights to further develop and support LaTex to the TeX Users Group at Stanford, led by Frank Mittelbach. The group is called the TeX Users Group (TUG), and it was the group that undertook the further development of the technology and the release of patches.
Distributed computing and networking remained a major focus of Lamport's research, during which he sought to develop a set of rules that could simplify and systematize this area. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Lamport formulated the Paxos algorithm, a fundamental concept of distributed systems. This algorithm laid the foundation for achieving consensus in a network of unreliable computers. Lamport's proposed idea of an automata approach in distributed computing can be called a critical development for the functioning of modern computer networks. He proposed a method of algorithm implementation in distributed systems that preserves robustness against failures. Based on Lamport's concepts, a family of protocols for performing distributed transactions was developed in the early 90s.
As Lamport himself said in one of his interviews, "A distributed system is one in which a computer failure you don't even know exists can render your machine unusable". He devoted his research to improving the reliability of such systems. It is generally accepted that Lamport's work has made possible the creation of cloud infrastructures for global providers such as Google and Amazon. In addition, his ideas have found application in modern implementations of artificial intelligence. For his contributions to systematizing the behavior of distributed systems, Lamport won the 2013 Turing Award, the most prestigious prize in computer science.
Lamport is the co-creator of the Chandy-Lamport algorithm for determining consistent global states and the author of the Lamport Signature, one of the prototypes of digital signatures that are now widely used for validating electronic documents. He is also known for his work on temporal logic, in particular as the inventor of Temporal logic of actions (TLA). This logic is used to describe the behavior of parallel and distributed systems. If several computers perform computations at overlapping time intervals, uncertainty can arise due to different clock readings in these systems. To solve such collisions, Lamport proposed to use the ideas of the special theory of relativity, as a result of which the concept of "logical clocks", also called "Lamport clocks", was born.
Based on his development, Lamport created the TLA+ specification language, which relies on set theory and temporal action logic. In particular, this tool allows the use of mathematical proofs to verify the correctness of software code, as well as describe precise algorithms for designing complex software systems. In Lamport's own words, this language can be seen as a "donkey-hop attempt to overcome engineers' antipathy towards math".
To explain the purpose of TLA+, Lamport used an analogy from the world of cooking: if developing a simple program is as simple as boiling a chicken egg, then a large project is akin to organizing a banquet where many dishes and drinks are served at different times. TLA+ allows you to describe the process of preparing these dishes and serving the table so that the correct portions are served to each guest in the correct order and no unfortunate mistakes or misunderstandings occur during the event. TLA+ uses the specifications as inputs and verifies that they will work as intended. Lamport ironically argued that software engineers often embark on a project without making sure that it can be realized given the original requirements, available tools, and resources, while no cook would start preparing food for a banquet unless he was sure that he had an adequate supply of food and that the recipe could be put into practice.
The basics of the language and the theory of temporal logic of actions Leslie Lamport described in his book Specifying Systems: The TLA+ Language and Tools for Hardware and Software Engineers. However, the language is not widely used in the industry. Its creator himself explains it as follows: "Modern projects are done in a hurry. There is an old saying: "There is no time to do everything right. But there's always time to redo it." Because TLA+ requires upfront effort, you add a new step to the software development process, and that's a hard sell."
In 2001, Leslie Lamport left the DEC/Compaq group of companies to join Microsoft Research in California as a research developer. For his contributions to computing, Lamport has been awarded honorary professorships and doctorates at several European universities: the University of Rennes, Christian Albrecht University in Kiel, the University of Lugano, and the University of Nancy. In addition, Leslie Lamport is a member of numerous international computer associations. In 2011, he was elected a member of the US National Academy of Sciences.
Like many others renowned IT scientists, Leslie Lamport started his journey into the field of computing with mathematics. Nevertheless, he did not abandon his main path and managed to combine a mathematical scientific approach with computer science, which gave birth not only to the LaTeX standard, which is actively used all over the world to this day but also to the revolutionary Paxos algorithm, which became the cornerstone of distributed computing. Lamport's ability to bridge the worlds of maths and computer science speaks to his breadth of vision and genius as both a technician and a scientist. And his willingness to share his ideas freely, manifested in the open-source LaTeX code, contributed significantly to the development of electronic documentation and technical literature in the mid-1980s.
This article is written by Techical Editor Valentin Holmogorov and supported by the Serverspace team.
Serverspace is an international cloud provider offering automatic deployment of virtual infrastructure based on Linux and Windows from anywhere in the world in less than 1 minute. For the integration of client services, open tools like API, CLI, and Terraform are available.
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