Introduction.

Back in the days when the world’s first multiprocessor computers were being built
and clouds existed only in the sky, Leslie Lamport ruminated about a bakery. He
observed that in order to be served one at a time, customers had to solve a mutual
exclusion problem, and discovered a way for them to do so without the baker’s
help. The resulting Bakery algorithm foreshadowed some of the most important
developments in multiprocessor programming for years to come. Lamport’s works
have since been interwoven with four and a half decades of evolution of digital
computing technology, while multiprocessing and distributed computing have
become increasingly commonplace.
The body of Lamport’s works lays formal foundations for concurrent computations executed by multiple processes—be they threads running on a shared memory multicore platform or autonomous agents communicating via message passing. He put forward fundamental concepts, such as causality and logical time,
atomic shared registers, sequential consistency, state machine replication, Byzantine agreement, and wait-freedom. Some of his algorithms have become standard
engineering practice for fault-tolerant distributed computing—distributed systems
that continue to function correctly despite failures of individual components. He
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.