He devised important algorithms and developed formal modeling and verification protocols that improve the quality of real distributed systems.

They are among the most cited papers in the field of computer science,[18] and describe algorithms to solve many fundamental problems in distributed systems, including: When Donald Knuth began issuing the early releases of TeX in the early 1980s, Lamport — due to his personal need of writing a book — also began working on a set of macros based on it, hoping that it would later become its standard macro package.

[25] Lamport received the 2013 Turing Award for "fundamental contributions to the theory and practice of distributed and concurrent systems, notably the invention of concepts such as causality and logical clocks, safety and liveness, replicated state machines, and sequential consistency", which can be used in synchronizing the systems.

[26][27] He was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 1991 for contributions to the theoretical foundations of concurrent and fault-tolerant computing.

He was elected to Fellow of Association for Computing Machinery for fundamental contributions to the theory and practice of distributed and concurrent systems in 2014.

[31] In honor of Lamport's sixtieth birthday, a lecture series was organized at the 20th Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC 2001).