Leslie Lamport is an American computer scientist best known for foundational work on how independent computers can agree on a shared view of the world. His personal publications site, which he maintains himself, collects his papers along with his own notes about how each one came to be written and how it was later received.
His 1978 paper “Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System” introduced logical clocks and the “happens before” relation, and Lamport notes on his own site that it is his most frequently cited work. The same body of work showed how to replicate a state machine across many computers so they stay consistent even as messages arrive in different orders.
Lamport’s later contributions include the Paxos consensus algorithm, the Byzantine generals problem (on tolerating components that fail in arbitrary or malicious ways), the bakery algorithm for mutual exclusion, distributed snapshots (with Mani Chandy), and the TLA+ specification language for describing and checking concurrent systems. He is also the original author of LaTeX, the document preparation system built on top of Donald Knuth’s TeX.
In 2013 the Association for Computing Machinery awarded Lamport the A.M. Turing Award, often called the Nobel Prize of computing. The ACM citation credits him with developing formal modeling and verification methods that improved the correctness, performance, and reliability of computer systems, and singles out the 1978 logical-clocks paper as one of the most cited in the history of the field.