Michael E. Lesk (born 1945) is an American

computer scientist A computer scientist is a scientist who specializes in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation. Although computer scientists can also focus their work and research on ...

Biography

In the 1960s, Michael Lesk worked for the

SMART Information Retrieval System The SMART (System for the Mechanical Analysis and Retrieval of Text) Information Retrieval System is an information retrieval system developed at Cornell University in the 1960s. Many important concepts in information retrieval were developed as par ...

project, wrote much of its retrieval code and did many of the retrieval experiments, as well as obtaining a

BA degree A Bachelor of Arts (abbreviated B.A., BA, A.B. or AB; from the Latin ', ', or ') is the holder of a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate program in the liberal arts, or, in some cases, other disciplines. A Bachelor of Arts degree ...

in Physics and Chemistry from

Harvard College Harvard College is the undergraduate education, undergraduate college of Harvard University, a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Part of the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Scienc ...

in 1964 and a

PhD A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, DPhil; or ) is a terminal degree that usually denotes the highest level of academic achievement in a given discipline and is awarded following a course of graduate study and original research. The name of the deg ...

from

Harvard University Harvard University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 1636 and named for its first benefactor, the History of the Puritans in North America, Puritan clergyma ...

Chemical Physics Chemical physics is a branch of physics that studies chemical processes from a physical point of view. It focuses on understanding the physical properties and behavior of chemical systems, using principles from both physics and chemistry. This ...

in 1969. From 1970 to 1984, Lesk worked at

Bell Labs Nokia Bell Labs, commonly referred to as ''Bell Labs'', is an American industrial research and development company owned by Finnish technology company Nokia. With headquarters located in Murray Hill, New Jersey, Murray Hill, New Jersey, the compa ...

in the group that built

Unix Unix (, ; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multi-user computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, a ...

. Lesk wrote Unix tools for word processing ('' tbl'', '' refer'', and the standard ''ms'' macro package, all for ''

troff troff (), short for "typesetter roff", is the major component of a document processing system developed by Bell Labs for the Unix operating system. troff and the related nroff were both developed from the original roff (software), roff. Whil ...

''), for compiling (''

Lex Lex or LEX may refer to: Computing * Amazon Lex, a service for building conversational interfaces into any application using voice and text * LEX (cipher), a stream cipher based on the round transformation of AES * Lex (software), a computer pro ...

''), and for networking (''

uucp UUCP (Unix-to-Unix Copy) is a suite of computer programs and communications protocol, protocols allowing remote execution of commands and transfer of computer file, files, email and netnews between computers. A command named is one of the prog ...

''). He also wrote the Portable I/O Library (the predecessor to

stdio.h The C programming language provides many standard library functions for file input and output. These functions make up the bulk of the C standard library header . The functionality descends from a "portable I/O package" written by Mike Lesk at ...

in C) and contributed significantly to the development of the

C language C (''pronounced'' '' – like the letter c'') is a general-purpose programming language. It was created in the 1970s by Dennis Ritchie and remains very widely used and influential. By design, C's features cleanly reflect the capabilities o ...

preprocessor. In 1984, he left to work for

Bellcore iconectiv supplies communications providers with network planning and management services. The company’s cloud-based information as a service network and operations management and numbering solutions span trusted communications, digital identi ...

, where he managed the computer science research group. There, Lesk worked on specific information systems applications, mostly with

geography Geography (from Ancient Greek ; combining 'Earth' and 'write', literally 'Earth writing') is the study of the lands, features, inhabitants, and phenomena of Earth. Geography is an all-encompassing discipline that seeks an understanding o ...

(a system for driving directions) and

dictionaries A dictionary is a listing of lexemes from the lexicon of one or more specific languages, often arranged Alphabetical order, alphabetically (or by Semitic root, consonantal root for Semitic languages or radical-and-stroke sorting, radical an ...

(a system for disambiguating words in context). In the 1990s, Lesk worked on a large chemical information system, the CORE project, with

Cornell Cornell University is a private Ivy League research university based in Ithaca, New York, United States. The university was co-founded by American philanthropist Ezra Cornell and historian and educator Andrew Dickson White in 1865. Since ...

Online Computer Library Center OCLC, Inc. See also: is an American nonprofit cooperative organization "that provides shared technology services, original research, and community programs for its membership and the library community at large". It was founded in 1967 as the ...

American Chemical Society The American Chemical Society (ACS) is a scientific society based in the United States that supports scientific inquiry in the field of chemistry. Founded in 1876 at New York University, the ACS currently has more than 155,000 members at all ...

, and

Chemical Abstracts Service Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) is a division of the American Chemical Society. It is a source of chemical information and is located in Columbus, Ohio, United States. Print periodicals ''Chemical Abstracts'' is a periodical index that provid ...

. From 1998 to 2002, Lesk headed the

National Science Foundation The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) is an Independent agencies of the United States government#Examples of independent agencies, independent agency of the Federal government of the United States, United States federal government that su ...

's Division of Information and Intelligent Systems, where he oversaw Phase 2 of the NSF's Digital Library Initiative. He was a professor on the faculty of the Library and Information Science Department, School of Communication & Information,

Rutgers University Rutgers University ( ), officially Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, is a Public university, public land-grant research university consisting of three campuses in New Jersey. Chartered in 1766, Rutgers was originally called Queen's C ...

, from 2003 to 2023. Lesk received the ''Flame'' award for lifetime achievement from

Usenix USENIX is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit membership organization based in Berkeley, California and founded in 1975 that supports advanced computing systems, operating system (OS), and computer networking research. It organizes several confe ...

in 1994, is a Fellow of the ACM in 1996, and in 2005 was elected to the

National Academy of Engineering The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) is an American Nonprofit organization, nonprofit, NGO, non-governmental organization. It is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), along with the National Academ ...

. He has authored a number of books.

Bibliography

Selected books by Michael Lesk: * ''Practical Digital Libraries: Books, Bytes, and Bucks'', 1997. . * ''Understanding Digital Libraries'', 2nd ed., December 2004. .

References

External links

Michael Lesk personal website
* {{DEFAULTSORT:Lesk, Michael 1945 births Living people Harvard College alumni American computer programmers Scientists at Bell Labs Rutgers University faculty Unix people Members of the United States National Academy of Engineering 1996 fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery Troff Computational linguistics researchers Data miners