Leslie Lamport is due to speak at Hopkins in the weekly seminar series. Needless to say, I'm excited and looking forward to hearing one of the great sages of Computer Science speak.
Here is a Bio that was circulated by the CS Department, probably self-authored :-)
Dr. Lamport is best known as the author of LaTeX, a document
formatting system for people who write formulas instead of drawing
pictures. This naturally led him to join Microsoft, a company with
little interest in such people. He is also known for writing
"A distributed system is one in which the failure of a
computer you didn't even know existed can render your
own computer unusable."
which established him as an expert on distributed systems. Among his
other contributions is the TLA+ specification language--a Quixotic
attempt to overcome engineers' fear of and computer scientists'
antipathy towards mathematics.
The fact that I am currently taking a Distributed Systems course right now, can only be decribed as poetic.
