Pioneer in Distributed Systems - Leslie Lambert

Leslie Lamport may not be a household name, but to computer scientists he is the contributor behind some familiar "names".For example, the Paxos algorithm, the typesetting program LaTeX, the specification language TLA+, the "bakery algorithm" and the "Byzantine generals problem", etc.

Lamport was born in New York in 1941, the son of European immigrants.After earning a bachelor's degree at MIT, Lamport went to Brandeis University to pursue a Ph.D. in mathematics, before giving up soon after to teach mathematics at Marlboro College, a small liberal arts school in Vermont.After that, he went to the Massachusetts Computer Society to do part-time work, doing ILLIAC design.

Lamport describes himself as a mathematician, followed by a computer scientist.Emphasize the importance you place on proof.

Lambert revolutionized the way modern computers talk.In 2013, he was awarded the Turing Award for his work on distributed systems.

In a distributed system, multiple components on different networks coordinate to achieve a common goal.Internet search, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence all require the coordination of numerous powerful computing machines working together.Of course, this coordination will also make us encounter more problems.

Lambert once said, "A distributed system is a system in which the failure of a computer you didn't even know existed would render your own computer unusable."

One of the biggest sources of problems is "concurrent systems", where multiple computing operations occur in overlapping time slices, which leads to a kind of ambiguity: which computer has the correct clock?In a seminal paper in 1978, Lambert introduced the concept of "causality", using the perspective of special relativity to solve this problem.Two observers may disagree on the order of events, but if one event causes the other to happen, then the ambiguity is removed.Sending or receiving messages can establish a causal relationship between multiple processes."Logical clocks" (now also known as Lambert clocks), provide a standard way to reason about concurrent systems.

With this tool, computer scientists began to wonder how they could systematically make these connected computers larger without adding bugs.Lambert came up with an elegant solution: Paxos, a "consensus algorithm" that allows multiple computers to perform complex tasks.Modern computing could not exist without Paxos and its family of algorithms.The Paxos algorithm is now an industry standard.

For his research results, Lambert said, I hope they can all play a role, "Because individuals have different understandings of beauty, which theory people prefer is also 'the benevolent sees benevolence, and the wise sees wisdom'".Referring to the secret of success, he believes that everyone's research path will be different from person to person, and since the current computer science environment has changed drastically from the time when he started, his experience may not apply to every person.one person.If a person "finally wants to be who he wants to be, he has to be his own strictest judge".