Lamport, Turing
Theories abound (I have my own) about why it did not happen long ago, but at last Lamport did receive the Turing Award. For me what most characterizes him is a stream [1] of elegant, original, insightful articles providing solutions to one important and thorny problem after another. Some of these articles are well known but many gems are not; see for example his take on Buridan’s Ass [2], not even a computer science paper, offering a convincing treatment of a centuries-old riddle.
References
[1] Leslie Lamport: annotated publication list, here.
[2] Leslie Lamport: Buridan’s Principle, “to appear in Foundations of Physics“, dated 24 February 2012, available here.
Eiffel Software
Home page at ETH
Informatics Europe
LASER summer school
Propulsion Academy