I’m thinking about distributed consensus algorithms, timestamping, and databases and if you read that literature you will see many references to the Fischer, Lynch, Paterson “theorem”. Google Scholar tells me the paper has been cited more than 4500 times. The theorem
Fischer Lynch Patterson and timeouts
There is a widely cited (over 1400 cites in CiteseerX ) result called the Fischer-Lynch-Patterson theorem about consensus – a key issue in distributed databases or any system where data is either distributed or replicated or both. In this paper, we