This book is a celebration of Leslie Lamport’s work on concurrency, interwoven in four-and-a-half decades of an evolving industry: from the introduction of the first personal computer
to an era when parallel and distributed multiprocessors are abundant. His works lay formal
foundations for concurrent computations executed by interconnected computers. Some of the
algorithms have become standard engineering practice for fault tolerant distributed computing -
distributed systems that continue to function correctly despite failures of individual components.
He also developed a substantial body of work on the formal specification and verification of
concurrent systems, and has contributed to the development of automated tools applying these
methods.
Part I consists of technical chapters of the book and a biography. The technical chapters of
this book present a retrospective on Lamport’s original ideas from experts in the field. Through
this lens, it portrays their long-lasting impact. The chapters cover timeless notions Lamport
introduced: the Bakery algorithm, atomic shared registers and sequential consistency; causality
and logical time; Byzantine Agreement; state machine replication and Paxos; temporal logic of
actions (TLA). The professional biography tells of Lamport’s career, providing the context in
which his work arose and broke new grounds, and discusses La TeX - perhaps Lamport’s most
influential contribution outside the field of concurrency. This chapter gives a voice to the people
behind the achievements, notably Lamport himself, and additionally the colleagues around
him, who inspired, collaborated, and helped him drive worldwide impact. Part II consists of a
selection of Leslie Lamport’s most influential papers.
This book touches on a lifetime of contributions
by Leslie Lamport to the field of concurrency
and on the extensive influence he had on
people working in the field. It will be of value
to historians of science, and to researchers and
students who work in the area of concurrency
and who are interested to read about the work
of one of the most influential researchers in this
field.