"A distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you didn't even know existed can render your own computer unusable."
- Leslie Lamport
Leslie Lamport's initial interests were not simply in science; they were in Einstein's theory of special relativity. Born in 1941 in New York City, Lamport graduated first from MIT with a B.S. in mathematics, then from Brandeis with a PhD in the same field. After graduation in 1972, Lamport continued his work with COMPASS (Massachusetts Computer Associates), the company that was "contract[ed] to write a Fortran compiler for the ILLIAC IV" (125). While with COMPASS, Lamport had the chance to do some research on the variety of algorithms. At that point, Dijkstra's many algorithmic solutions for computer science problems were widely publicized, and Lamport was able to not only use these algorithms but also optimize them. Lamport's Bakery Algorithm and his work on atomic registers provided many software and hardware solutions in industry application, especially those dealing with early integrated circuitry. His work on distributed systems also made a lasting impact in computer science, as today these algorithms are used to govern networks and larger applications that employ multithreading. Lamport's another invention famous only in the tech community is LATEX, a formatting system which he implemented as a hobby in his spare time. Today, "close to 75% of all computer science papers are written in LATEX." If that is not a clear, lasting impact on the discipline, what is?
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