Leslie Lamport is a researcher in American Informatique, specialist in the algorithmic distributed. It was born in 1941 with New York and made studies in Mathématiques with the Massachusetts Institute off Technology (MIT) then at the university of Brandeis.

He in particular formulated in 1979 the relation “Arrive-before” (in English “happened before”), which makes it possible to obtain a partial order on the actions in systems distributed. Lamport also invented the system of clock which bears its name. They are used within the framework of the synchronization of the distributed systems. He also worked on certain cryptographic aspects like the passwords of single use and other problems involved in the consensus and competition in the networks.

However, Leslie Lamport is mainly known out of the scientific community of data processing like the creator of LaTeX (based itself on TeX, of Donald Knuth), a system of page layout of documents in particular used by the scientists of certain disciplines (data processing, Mathématiques, Physique, Bio-data processing…) for documents comprising of many mathematical formulas. Since, the development of Latex is ensured by others.

He currently works for the research centres of Microsoft.