Leslie Lamport
loreThe 2013 Turing Award recipient for imposing order on distributed systems: logical clocks, distributed snapshots, Paxos, Byzantine fault tolerance, the safety and liveness distinction - and LaTeX.
His 1978 paper on time, clocks and the ordering of events is among the most cited in computing, and its point is that in a distributed system there is no global now - only causality, which you can order without a shared clock. Everything downstream depends on that: consensus, replication, and every database that must decide which write happened first. His own line describes the field better than any textbook: a distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you did not know existed can render your own computer unusable.
Also known as: lamport, paxos, tla+
Sources
- ACM A.M. Turing Award - Leslie Lamport, laureate page: logical clocks, distributed snapshots, Paxos and TLA+
- ACM announcement of the 2013 Turing Award to Leslie Lamport, naming safety and liveness, Byzantine fault tolerance, TLA+ and LaTeX
- Lamport, 'Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System', Communications of the ACM 21(7), July 1978, from his own publication archive