In this episode of ACM ByteCast, our special guest host Scott Hanselman (of The Hanselminutes Podcast) welcomes 2013 ACM A.M. Turing Award laureate Leslie Lamport of Microsoft Research, best known for his seminal work in distributed and concurrent systems, and as the initial developer of the document preparation system LaTeX and the author of its first manual. Among his many honors and recognitions, Lamport is a Fellow of ACM and has received the IEEE Emanuel R. Piore Award, the Dijkstra Prize, and the IEEE John von Neumann Medal.
Leslie shares his journey into computing, which started out as something he only did in his spare time as a mathematician. Scott and Leslie discuss the differences and similarities between computer science and software engineering, the math involved in Leslie’s high-level temporal logic of actions (TLA), which can help solve the famous Byzantine Generals Problem, and the algorithms Leslie himself has created. He also reflects on how the building of distributed systems has changes since the 60s and 70s.
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