Lambda

Lambda is the eleventh letter of the Greek alphabet. In science and mathematics, the name is widely used as a symbol for various concepts, including wavelength (denoted by the Greek letter λ) and eigenvalues in linear algebra.

Lambda calculus is a formal system developed in the 1930s by Alonzo Church for defining and applying functions. It uses function abstraction and application, with computation proceeding by beta reduction. It forms a foundational model of computation and has influenced the design of functional programming languages.

Lambda expressions in programming languages provide anonymous functions that can be passed as values, stored in data structures, and used as arguments. They are central to functional and modern imperative languages, such as JavaScript, Python, Java, and C#, and reflect ideas from lambda calculus while incorporating language-specific features like closures and type systems.

AWS Lambda is a serverless compute service from Amazon Web Services. It runs user code in response to events or HTTP requests without provisioning servers. Supported runtimes include Node.js, Python, Java, Go, and .NET; pricing is based on the number of requests and compute time, with a maximum per-invocation execution time of 15 minutes. It is commonly used for microservices, data processing, and real-time workflows.