[HN Gopher] Leslie Lamport revolutionized computer science with ...
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Leslie Lamport revolutionized computer science with math [video]
Author : chat
Score : 100 points
Date : 2022-05-24 19:55 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.youtube.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.youtube.com)
| nanna wrote:
| Leslie Lamport built Knuth's TeX into the user-friendly version
| to which he appended the first two letters of his surname: LaTeX.
| He wrote an excellent, highly accessible guide, LaTeX: A Document
| Preparation System, which I wish I read before setting off on a
| thousand random web pages.
| math-dev wrote:
| Something related: https://www.quantamagazine.org/computing-
| expert-says-program...
| _448 wrote:
| At the end of explaining the "bakery algorithm", he says "I am
| proud that I _stumbled on it_ " He doesn't say "I invented it",
| "I came with it", "I wrote it", etc, etc.
|
| In my career I have seen that people who are true geniuses are
| also very humble!
| lifefeed wrote:
| There's a list of his papers with little notes by him on every
| one at https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/pubs.html . His
| casual notes are themselves an absolute education.
|
| My favorite is on "Time, Clocks and the Ordering of Events in a
| Distributed System", where he applies the lessons of special
| relativity to understand computers, and he says:
|
| > Jim Gray once told me that he had heard two different
| opinions of this paper: that it's trivial and that it's
| brilliant. I can't argue with the former, and I am disinclined
| to argue with the latter.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| I think one of the things that helped was his ability to come up
| with very catchy explanations and names. "Paxos" and "Byzantine
| Generals" have great memetic power verses some boring technical
| name.
| jamesblonde wrote:
| Great video. I met Leslie once, sat on the bus beside him on the
| way to a conference around 8 years ago. He wasn't the chattiest,
| but you bring up his work, he likes to talk. I think he was just
| over 70 years old, but still incredibly sharp. At the time
| Microsoft Research were shutting down their valley office, but
| they would still let him come in there - last one to put the
| lights out (metaphorically for computer science research at the
| big IT companies). Nowadays, he couldn't do the research work he
| did there and at other places at any big IT company - it's R&D,
| with the emphasis on "D".
| peppertree wrote:
| I believe VMWare "adopted" Microsoft's research team, but
| that's the last I heard of the team. These days the most
| interesting corporate research happens at Google, Nvidia,
| OpenAI. I guess the forefront of research has moved onto ML and
| many old school researchers got left behind.
| metadat wrote:
| There's lots of other research happening all over, but gets
| little attention probably due to non-existent or otherwise
| poor marketing beyond publishing papers.
| [deleted]
| InefficientRed wrote:
| There is tons of formal methods research happening in
| industry. Way more than in the days of Microsoft research
| silicon valley
| rhplus wrote:
| TLA+ and other formal language research is pursued by the
| RISE group in Microsoft Research:
|
| https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/group/research-
| soft...
| avgcorrection wrote:
| > I think he was just over 70 years old, but still incredibly
| sharp.
|
| Nice...
|
| I don't think someone at his level becomes dull at such a young
| senior age.
| triska wrote:
| One of the most interesting results I found in Leslie Lamport's
| papers is _Buridan 's Principle_:
|
| _A discrete decision based upon an input having a continuous
| range of values cannot be made within a bounded length of time._
|
| Quoting from https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/buridan.pdf:
|
| _" The significance of Buridan's Principle lies in its warning
| that decisions may, in rare circumstances, take much longer than
| expected. Before the problem was recognized by computer
| designers, some computer systems probably failed regularly
| (perhaps once or twice a week) because arbiters took longer than
| expected to reach a decision. Real accidents may occur because
| people cannot decide in time which of two alternative actions to
| take, even though either would prevent the accident. Although
| Buridan's Principle implies that the possibility of such an
| accident cannot be eliminated, awareness of the problem could
| lead to methods for reducing its probability."_
|
| In the accompanying notes at
| https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/pubs.html, Lamport states:
|
| _The four reviews ranged from "This well-written paper is of
| major philosophical importance" to "This may be an elaborate
| joke." One of the other reviews was more mildly positive, and the
| fourth said simply "My feeling is that it is rather superficial."
| The paper was rejected._
| l33t2328 wrote:
| What about a decision like "can this wave be faithfully
| represented by this set of points?"
|
| Wouldn't the Sampling Theorem give an answer in some bounded
| time? Is the idea that the time required to crank the algorithm
| can grow without bound?
| [deleted]
| user3939382 wrote:
| I once carefully read his bio and accomplishments and have felt
| like a failure ever since.
| dboreham wrote:
| His later work prompted me to learn Order Theory, which has
| turned out to be useful for all sorts of things. Also quite
| closely related to Category Theory which I wouldn't have had much
| chance of grokking without first understanding Order Theory, I
| suspect.
|
| I also used LaTeX heavily in the 80s so was surprised to see him
| pop up as a genius of distributed systems later (although that
| work was published much earlier it didn't get much exposure until
| the 90s). Like "oh that guy must be _really_ smart to excel in
| two quite different fields".
| mhh__ wrote:
| He wrote some interesting stuff on mathematics and physics in
| the 60s too but it's all lost to time apparently.
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| Are there any good resources you recommend for learning Order
| Theory?
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