Most of you probably know Leslie Lamport as the original author of LaTeX but within the computer science community, he’s mostly known for his work on distributed systems. Like Knuth, Lamport was trained as a mathematician but rather than pursue a career in the analysis of algorithms, Lamport devoted himself to solving problems he found in industry.
In this short video, Lamport talks about his approach to computer science and some of the interesting problems he solved. Interestingly, he stumbled onto the thing he’s best know for, distributed computing, by accident. He received a paper on distributed databases and realized that relativity theory—yes, really—could be brought to bear to show the proposed algorithm was wrong. Until he wrote the paper explaining his findings, he says, he had never thought about distributed systems.
Lamport’s career is an inspiring example to those who want to pursue a career in computer science research but aren’t interested in being an academic. His entire career has been spent in industry but he’s authored almost 200 papers in computer science.
The Bakery Algorithm that Lamport mentions in the video is available here. It’s short and easy to read for those interested. Lamport says he didn’t design the algorithm to be as robust as it is but discovered how effective it is when he devised the proof of its correctness.
It’s an interesting video and only 7 minutes, 49 seconds long so you should definitely spend the time to watch it.