View a video by Microsoft Research on Leslie Lamport's work and read his 1978 paper, "Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System," one of the most cited in the history of computer science.
In a second video, in his own voice for the June 2014 issue of Communications of the ACM, Lamport asserts that the best logic for stating things clearly is mathematics, a concept, he notes, that some find controversial. Assessing his body of work, he concludes that he created a path that others have followed to places well beyond his imagination.