A wide-ranging interview with Leslie Lamport, Turing Award winner and inventor of the Paxos algorithm, covering the stories behind his most influential contributions to computer science. Topics include the origin of the Bakery Algorithm for mutual exclusion, his collaboration with Dijkstra on concurrent garbage collection, the 'Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events' paper and its connection to special relativity, the Byzantine Generals problem and fault-tolerant systems, the Paxos algorithm and its eight-year publication delay, a comparison with Raft (including a bug in Raft that users found 'understandable'), the creation of LaTeX, and his philosophy that writing forces clear thinking. Lamport reflects on why abstraction—not raw intelligence—drove his success, why he worked in industry rather than academia, and his view that state machines are the true 'Turing machine of concurrency.'
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