Science that sings

FOR a scientist, Leslie Lamport - winner of the 2013 Turing Award, widely considered the Nobel Prize for computing - has a somewhat unusual way of describing his day job. "I do two things. I'm a writer and I'm a performer. That's because I write (technical) papers and I also give lectures," says the Distinguished Scientist at Microsoft Research.

As a writer and performer, he finds magic in great literature. Within a few minutes of our meeting, Dr Lamport starts reeling off famous first lines of great works with reverence in his voice: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times..." from Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities; poet Allen Ginsberg's "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness..."; TS Eliot's "April is the cruellest month..." from the poem The Waste Land; as well as several others.

Dr Lamport mentions these in the context of how even scientific papers should start off with good writing. Citing a talk he gave during a course on science writing, he recalls: "I mentioned these great first lines and then compared them with the first lines of papers in a science journal that I had taken with me to the talk. The first lines in the journal were essentially: 'blah, blah, blah...' I told the audience that such introductions are not going to make people want to read the paper. Your first sentence should convey the excitement you feel, that which prompted you to write the paper in the first place."