Nancy Ann Lynch (born January 19, 1948)[1] is a computer scientist affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Since then, she has been working on applying mathematics to the tasks of understanding and constructing complex distributed systems.
Her 1985 work with Michael J. Fischer and Mike Paterson[4] on consensus problems received the PODC Influential-Paper Award in 2001.
[5] Their work showed that in an asynchronous distributed system, consensus is impossible if there is one processor that crashes.
On their contribution, Jennifer Welch wrote that "this result has had a monumental impact in distributed computing, both theory and practice.