The FLP Impossibility Result
A handful of computers cannot be guaranteed to agree on a single value if even one of them might be slow. Not merely hard — impossible.
198523 min read
American computer science
Nancy Lynch
1948
American computer scientist and professor at MIT, the leading figure in the theory of distributed computing. She co-authored the 1985 FLP impossibility result, the 2002 proof of Brewer's CAP conjecture with Seth Gilbert, and the input/output automata framework used to specify and verify concurrent systems. Her textbook "Distributed Algorithms" (1996) is the standard reference.
2 entries
The CAP Theorem
A system spread across several machines can give you consistent answers, or always answer at all. The network makes you choose.
2000 (conjectured), 2002 (proved)23 min read