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ACM President Vint Cerf, in a statement, noted that "as an applied mathematician, [Leslie Lamport] had an extraordinary sense of how to apply mathematical tools to important practical problems. By finding useful ways to write specifications and prove correctness of realistic algorithms, assuring a strong foundation for complex computing operations, he helped to move verification from an academic discipline to a practical tool."
Specifically, Lamport's claims to fame include the notion of Byzantine failure, temporal logic language (TLA+) and LaTex, a document preparation system used in computer science and other fields. Lamport's 1978 paper "Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System" - is one of computer science's most highly cited.