Leslie Lamport: programming ≠ coding

Speaker
Leslie Lamport (Microsoft)
Date
Thu April 11th 2024, 7:30 - 9:00pm
Location
Everett and Jane Hauck Auditorium, David and Joan Traitel Building of Hoover Institution, Stanford University

Davey Hubay of d(h)sign

MRC Event Series

Coding is the last step in writing a program. The first step is deciding what we want to achieve and how. The best methods for working through subsequent steps consist in using simple mathematics. Few programmers know how to do this or where to learn it. This lecture will use various examples to show how this is done, and how these methods are implemented in real software.

When you use a computer, you use algorithms developed by Leslie Lamport. Winner of the 2013 Turing Award (considered the "Nobel Prize of computer science"), he is renowned for solving practical problems in the computer industry by mathematically creating frameworks for distributed systems and concurrent programming. He is also famous as the author of the LaTeX document formatting language, a dialect of TeX which has become the standard of publishing in the mathematical sciences.

You can learn more about Leslie Lamport here: https://www.lamport.org/