Lamport’s research contributions have laid the foundations of the theory of distributed systems. Among his most notable papers are

• “Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System”, which received the PODC Influential Paper Award in 2000,
• “How to Make a Multiprocessor Computer That Correctly Executes Multiprocess Programs” , which defined the notion of Sequential consistency,
• “The Byzantine Generals Problem”,
• “Distributed Snapshots: Determining Global States of a Distributed System” and
• “The Part-Time Parliament”.

These papers relate to such concepts as logical clocks (and the happened-before relationship) and Byzantine failures. They are among the most cited papers in the field of computer science and describe algorithms to solve many fundamental problems in distributed systems, including:

• the Paxos algorithm for consensus,
• the bakery algorithm for mutual exclusion of multiple threads in a computer system that require the same resources at the same time and
• the snapshot algorithm for the determination of consistent global states.

Lamport is also known for his work on temporal logic, where he introduced the temporal logic of actions (TLA). Among his more recent contributions is TLA+, a logic for specifying and reasoning about concurrent and reactive systems, that he describes in the book “Specifying Systems: The TLA+ Language and Tools for Hardware and Software Engineers” and defines as a “quixotic attempt to overcome engineers' antipathy towards mathematics”.

Lamport received four honorary doctorates from European universities: University of Rennes and Christian Albrechts University of Kiel in 2003, EPFL in 2004 and University of Lugano in 2006. In 2004, he received the IEEE Piore Award. In 2005, the paper “Reaching Agreement in the Presence of Faults” received the Dijkstra Prize. In honor of Lamport's sixtieth birthday, a lecture series was organised at the 20th Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC 2001).

Lamport is the author of the aphorism: