15 min
World-leading Computer Scientists: Leslie B Lamport (Clocks, LaTeX, Byzantine Generals and Post Quantum Crypto) ASecuritySite Podcast
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- Technology
Related page: https://medium.com/asecuritysite-when-bob-met-alice/clocks-latex-byzantine-generals-and-post-quantum-crypto-meet-the-amazing-leslie-b-lamport-b2ade4b590d7
Demo: https://asecuritysite.com/hashsig/lamport
Introduction
I write this article in Medium and with its limited text editor, but I really would love to write it in LaTeX. Before the monopoly of Microsoft Word, there were document mark-up systems such as Lotus Manuscript, and where we had a basic editor to produce publishing-ready content. The GUI came along, and all the back-end stuff was pushed away from the user. For many, this is fine, but for those whose output is focused on sharing and dissemination of research, it is often the only way to work.
In research, LaTeX is King and is a fully formed method of laying out — and sharing — research outputs. In the past few years, we have published over 100 research papers, and not one of them has been created in Microsoft Word. And for this, I thank Leslie Lamport.
In fact, ask our kids about Newton, Faraday or Einstein, and they could probably tell you something about them. But ask them about Whitfield Diffie, Shafi Goldwasser, or Leslie B Lamport, and they would probably look quizzical? Their future world, though, is probably going to be built around some of the amazing minds that built the most amazing structure ever created … The Internet.
To Leslie Lamport So, I am so privileged to be an academic researcher. For me, teaching, innovation and research go hand-in-hand, and where the things I research into gives me ideas for innovation, and which I can then integrate these things into my teaching. The continual probing of questions from students also pushes me to think differently about things, and so the cycle goes on. But, we are all just building on the shoulders of true giants, and there are few larger giants than Leslie Lamport — the creator of LaTeX.
For me, every time I open up a LaTeX document, I think of the work he did on creating LaTeX, and which makes my research work so much more productive. If I was still stuck with Microsoft Office for research, I would spend half of my time in that horrible equation editor, or in trying to integrate the references into the required format, or in formatting Header 1 and Header 2 to have a six-point spacing underneath. So, for me, the contest between LaTeX and Microsoft Word is a knock-out in the first round.
And one of the great things about Leslie is that his work is strongly academic — and which provides foundations for others to build on. For this, he did a great deal on the ordering of task synchronisation, in state theory, cryptography signatures, and fault tolerance.
LaTeX I really can say enough about how much LaTeX — created in 1984 — helps my work. I am writing a few books just now, and it allows me to lay out the books in the way that I want to deliver the content. There’s no need for a further mark-up, as I work on the output that the reader will see. But the true genius of LaTeX is the way that teams can work on a paper, and where there can be async to GitHub and where version control is then embedded.
Overall we use Overleaf, but we’re not tie-in to that, and can move to any editor we want. But the process is just so much better than Microsoft Word, especially when creating a thesis. Word is really just the same old package it was in the 1990s, and still hides lots away, and which makes it really difficult to create content which can easily be changed for its layout. With LaTeX, you create the content and can then apply whatever style you want.
Clocks Many in the research community think that the quality measure of a paper is the impact factor of the journal that it is submitted to, or in the amount of maths that it contains. But, in the end, it is the impact of the paper, and how it changes thinking. For Leslie, in 1978, his paper on clocks changed our scientific world and is one of the most
Related page: https://medium.com/asecuritysite-when-bob-met-alice/clocks-latex-byzantine-generals-and-post-quantum-crypto-meet-the-amazing-leslie-b-lamport-b2ade4b590d7
Demo: https://asecuritysite.com/hashsig/lamport
Introduction
I write this article in Medium and with its limited text editor, but I really would love to write it in LaTeX. Before the monopoly of Microsoft Word, there were document mark-up systems such as Lotus Manuscript, and where we had a basic editor to produce publishing-ready content. The GUI came along, and all the back-end stuff was pushed away from the user. For many, this is fine, but for those whose output is focused on sharing and dissemination of research, it is often the only way to work.
In research, LaTeX is King and is a fully formed method of laying out — and sharing — research outputs. In the past few years, we have published over 100 research papers, and not one of them has been created in Microsoft Word. And for this, I thank Leslie Lamport.
In fact, ask our kids about Newton, Faraday or Einstein, and they could probably tell you something about them. But ask them about Whitfield Diffie, Shafi Goldwasser, or Leslie B Lamport, and they would probably look quizzical? Their future world, though, is probably going to be built around some of the amazing minds that built the most amazing structure ever created … The Internet.
To Leslie Lamport So, I am so privileged to be an academic researcher. For me, teaching, innovation and research go hand-in-hand, and where the things I research into gives me ideas for innovation, and which I can then integrate these things into my teaching. The continual probing of questions from students also pushes me to think differently about things, and so the cycle goes on. But, we are all just building on the shoulders of true giants, and there are few larger giants than Leslie Lamport — the creator of LaTeX.
For me, every time I open up a LaTeX document, I think of the work he did on creating LaTeX, and which makes my research work so much more productive. If I was still stuck with Microsoft Office for research, I would spend half of my time in that horrible equation editor, or in trying to integrate the references into the required format, or in formatting Header 1 and Header 2 to have a six-point spacing underneath. So, for me, the contest between LaTeX and Microsoft Word is a knock-out in the first round.
And one of the great things about Leslie is that his work is strongly academic — and which provides foundations for others to build on. For this, he did a great deal on the ordering of task synchronisation, in state theory, cryptography signatures, and fault tolerance.
LaTeX I really can say enough about how much LaTeX — created in 1984 — helps my work. I am writing a few books just now, and it allows me to lay out the books in the way that I want to deliver the content. There’s no need for a further mark-up, as I work on the output that the reader will see. But the true genius of LaTeX is the way that teams can work on a paper, and where there can be async to GitHub and where version control is then embedded.
Overall we use Overleaf, but we’re not tie-in to that, and can move to any editor we want. But the process is just so much better than Microsoft Word, especially when creating a thesis. Word is really just the same old package it was in the 1990s, and still hides lots away, and which makes it really difficult to create content which can easily be changed for its layout. With LaTeX, you create the content and can then apply whatever style you want.
Clocks Many in the research community think that the quality measure of a paper is the impact factor of the journal that it is submitted to, or in the amount of maths that it contains. But, in the end, it is the impact of the paper, and how it changes thinking. For Leslie, in 1978, his paper on clocks changed our scientific world and is one of the most
15 min