Tuesday, March 18, 2014

Leslie Lamport wins Turing Award!

Leslie Lamport wins Turing Award!
See here for more details.

Leslie did work on reliability of systems and security that
(according to the article) is ACTUALLY BEING USED. So Real People
use his stuff.

He also developed LaTeX (building on TeX) which we all know and most
of us use. Academics use LaTeX but I honestly don't know how wide spread
it is outside of academia. However, this could be the first time that a Turing award winner did something that I used DIRECTLY (I am sure I use RSA and other things indirectly).

How well known is The Turing Award? its called `the nobel prize of computer science' but I think its far less well known than the Nobel Prize.

The Fields Medal and he Mill Prize got a big publicity boost when Perelman turned them down. But that only got them 15 minutes of fame, including a Stephen Colbert segment `whose not honoring me now'. So I will not be urging Leslie Lamport to turn  down his Turing Award in order to give it more fame.

CONGRATULATIONS!

3 comments:

  1. In response to Lance Fortnow's tweet (because I don't have a twitter account and refuse to open one): "Now the creators of TeX (Knuth) and LaTeX (Lamport) have both won Turing awards. Take that Microsoft Word."

    "Now the creator of algorithms to analyze complex, buggy distributed systems such as Microsoft Word has won a Turing award. Take that LaTeX" :-)

    Congratulations to Leslie Lamport on the well-deserved, and long-overdue Turing award!

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  2. hiya billie,

    i luv ur grammar! please change "then" to "than" in
    "but I think its far less well known then the Nobel Prize." (Feel free to delete this comment.)

    u might want to compare the Nobel prize in mathematics to the Nobel prize in TCS via price money. The abel prize brings in one mil whereas the Turing award only gets you 1/4 of a mil.

    And yes, Congratulations to Leslie Lamport on the well-deserved, and long-overdue Turing award!

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  3. about prizes: is this true https://twitter.com/veorq/status/441693910885486593 ? I didn't see it discussed anywhere.

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