Leslie Lamport is best known to mathematicians, physicists, and even to computer scientists as the creator of the formatting system LaTeX--universally preferred for writing technical papers, doctoral dissertations, and the like. However, most would be surprised to learn that it is not his life's work. Lamport's own research contributions lie in foundational results in distributed computing, as well as in temporal logic and fault tolerance.

Leslie Lamport was born in New York City on February 7, 1941, the second of two sons (his brother Edward, a commercial artist, is six years older). His parents Benjamin and Hannah were immigrants from Eastern Europe. His father had been unable to realize early ambitions of being a doctor, and ran a dry cleaning business instead. Being the son of immigrants and taking his first few steps in the post-Depression era when the world was at war with itself gave young Leslie a keen...