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Leslie Lamport: Chat with Leslie Lamport ACM Turing Award Recipient in 2014 (Nobel Prize of Computing); World-Renowned Distinguished Researcher
Leslie Lamport first started working with computers using vacuum tubes to build digital circuits while attending the Bronx High School of Science in New York. He went on to get his BS from MIT, MA and PhD from Brandeis, all in Mathematics. In addition, Lamport has been bestowed with honorary doctorates from France's Université de Rennes in 2003, Germany's Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel in 2003, Switzerland's École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in 2004, the Università della Svizzera Italiana in 2006, and France's Université Henri Poincaré in 2007.Turing Award

His first employer was the Mitre Corporation and Marlboro College while still a student, then Massachusetts Computer Associates while finishing his PhD and after completion. From 1977-1985 Leslie contributed to SRI International, 1985-2001 DEC/Compaq and 2001-present Microsoft Research.

Leslie's honors include:

National Academy of Engineering (1991)
PODC Influential Paper Award (2000)
Honorary Doctorate, University of Rennes (2003)
Honorary Doctorate, Christian Albrechts University, Kiel (2003)
Honorary Doctorate, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (2004)
IEEE Piore Award (2004)
Edsger W. Dijkstra Prize in Distributed Computing (2005)
Honorary Doctorate, Università della Svizzera Italiana, Lugano (2006)
ACM SIGOPS Hall of Fame Award (2007)
Honorary Doctorate, Université Henri Poincaré, Nancy (2007)
LICS 1988 Test of Time Award (2008)
IEEE John von Neumann Medal (2008)
National Academy of Sciences (2011)
ACM SIGOPS Hall of Fame Award (2012)
Jean-Claude Laprie Award in Dependable Computing (2013)
ACM SIGOPS Hall of Fame Award (2013)
ACM A.M. Turing Award (2013, awarded in 2014)
Leslie is a legend in computing circles as evidenced in his significant body of published work. His foundational work in the theory of distributed computing is acknowledged by computing luminaries worldwide including ACM President Vint Cerf — a previous Turing Award recipient; Wen-Hann Wang, Intel's Corporate Vice-President and Managing Director of Intel Labs; Alfred Spector, Google Vice-President of Research, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates. One of the most cited papers in computing history is his 1978 paper Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System. From the IT World article, "the Turing Award citation notes that Lamport originated causality and logical clocks, replicated state machines and sequential consistency. Along with others, he invented the notion of Byzantine failure and algorithms for reaching agreement despite such failures; he contributed to the development and understanding of proof methods for concurrent systems, notably by introducing the notions of safety and liveness as the proper generalizations of partial correctness and termination to the concurrent setting."

As noted by Bob Taylor, founder and manager of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center and Digital Equipment Corp.'s Systems Research Center, "The Internet is based on distributed-systems technology, which is, in turn, based on a theoretical foundation invented by Leslie. So if you enjoy using the Internet, then you owe Leslie."