[texhax] [ACM-BULLETIN] Today's Topic: 2013 ACM Turing Award Goes to Leslie Lamport for Advancing Reliability and Consistency of Computing Systems

[Martin Schröder]

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From: ACM Bulletin <acmbulletin at acm.org>
Date: 2014-03-18 14:05 GMT+01:00
Subject: [ACM-BULLETIN] Today's Topic: 2013 ACM Turing Award Goes to Leslie
Lamport for Advancing Reliability and Consistency of Computing Systems
To: ACM-BULLETIN at listserv.acm.org


Today's Topic: 2013 ACM Turing Award Goes to Leslie Lamport for Advancing
Reliability and Consistency of Computing Systems

Tuesday, March 18, 2014
________________________________

ACM has named Leslie Lamport, a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research
Silicon Valley, the recipient of the 2013 ACM A.M. Turing Award for imposing
clear, well-defined coherence on the seemingly chaotic behavior of
distributed computing systems, in which several autonomous computers
communicate with each other by passing messages. He devised important
algorithms and developed formal modeling and verification protocols that
improve the quality of real distributed systems. These contributions have
resulted in improved correctness, performance, and reliability of computer
systems.

Lamport's practical and widely used algorithms and tools have applications
in security, cloud computing, embedded systems and database systems as well
as mission-critical computer systems that rely on secure information sharing
and interoperability to prevent failure. His notions of safety, where
nothing bad happens, and liveness, where something good happens, contribute
to the reliability and robustness of software and hardware engineering
design. His solutions for Byzantine Fault Tolerance contribute to failure
prevention in a system component that behaves erroneously when interacting
with other components. His creation of temporal logic language (TLA+) helps
to write precise, sound specifications. He also developed LaTeX, a document
preparation system that is the de facto standard for technical publishing in
computer science and other fields.

The ACM A.M. Turing Award, widely considered the "Nobel Prize in Computing,"
carries a $250,000 prize, with financial support provided by Intel
Corporation and Google Inc. It is named for Alan M. Turing, the British
mathematician who articulated the mathematical foundation and limits of
computing, and who was a key contributor to the Allied cryptanalysis of the
German Enigma cipher and the German "Tunny" encoding machine in World War
II.

ACM will present the 2013 A.M. Turing Award at its annual Awards Banquet on
June 21 in San Francisco, California.

Read more in the ACM press release.