Leslie Lamport is the author of some of the most cited computer science papers and won a Turing Award in 2013 for his seminal work in distributed and concurrent systems. This is a summary of an ...

Lamport’s 1978 paper “ Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System ” – is one of computer science’s most highly cited.

I [developed] Paxos [in 1989] because people at DEC [Digital Equipment Corporation] were building a distributed file system. The Paxos algorithm is very widely used now.

The award, which comes with a $250,000 prize, recognizes Lamport’s contributions to distributed computing systems, the underlying software that coordinate the activities of machines across networks.