{{Short description|American computer scientist (born 1945)}} {{Infobox scientist | name = Michael E. Lesk | image = | caption = | birth_date = | birth_place = United States | death_date = | death_place = | ethnicity = | field = IR, NLP, Programming languages | work_institution = Bellcore, Rutgers University | alma_mater = Harvard University | doctoral_advisor = | doctoral_students = | known_for = Lesk algorithm, Lex, SMART | author_abbreviation_bot = | author_abbreviation_zoo = | prizes = ACM Fellow (1996)<ref name="acm-fellow-96">{{cite web| url=http://awards.acm.org/award_winners/lesk_1118207.cfm | title=Michael E Lesk: ACM Fellows | date=1996 | publisher=ACM | access-date=9 December 2017 }}</ref><br/>NAE Member (2005) | religion = | footnotes = }} '''Michael E. Lesk''' (born 1945) is an American computer scientist.
==Biography== In the 1960s, Michael Lesk worked for the SMART Information Retrieval System project, wrote much of its retrieval code and did many of the retrieval experiments, as well as obtaining a BA degree in Physics and Chemistry from Harvard College in 1964 and a PhD from Harvard University in Chemical Physics in 1969.<ref name="lesk">{{cite web| url=http://lesk.com/mlesk/ | title=Michael Lesk's Grade Crossing on the Information Superhighway | website=lesk.com | access-date=9 December 2017 }}</ref><ref name="lesk-cv">{{cite web| url=https://comminfo.rutgers.edu/sites/default/files/2016-10/res09.pdf | title=Michael E. Lesk | date=8 June 2008 | publisher=Rutgers University | access-date=9 December 2017 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20171210072346/https://comminfo.rutgers.edu/sites/default/files/2016-10/res09.pdf |archive-date=2017-12-10}}</ref>
From 1970 to 1984, Lesk worked at Bell Labs in the group that built Unix. Lesk wrote Unix tools for word processing (''tbl'', ''refer'', and the standard ''ms'' macro package, all for ''troff''), for compiling (''Lex''), and for networking (''uucp''). He also wrote the Portable I/O Library (the predecessor to stdio.h in C) and contributed significantly to the development of the C language preprocessor.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/chist.html |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/19980220175804/http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/chist.html |url-status=dead |archive-date=1998-02-20 |title=The Development of the C Language |author=Dennis M. Ritchie |publisher=Association for Computing Machinery |year=1993 |access-date=2011-03-08 }}</ref>
In 1984, he left to work for Bellcore, where he managed the computer science research group.<ref name="lesk" /> There, Lesk worked on specific information systems applications, mostly with geography (a system for driving directions) and dictionaries (a system for disambiguating words in context). In the 1990s, Lesk worked on a large chemical information system, the CORE project, with Cornell, Online Computer Library Center, American Chemical Society, and Chemical Abstracts Service. From 1998 to 2002, Lesk headed the National Science Foundation'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, from 2003 to 2023.<ref name="lesk-cv" /><ref name="rutgers">{{cite web| url=https://comminfo.rutgers.edu/lesk-michael | title=Michael Lesk | publisher=Rutgers University | access-date=9 December 2017 }}</ref><ref name="ischools">{{cite web | url=https://www.ischools.org/post/michael-lesk-who-helped-build-the-computer-operating-system-unix-transitions-to-professor-emeritus | title=Michael Lesk, Who Helped Build the Computer Operating System Unix, Transitions to Professor Emeritus | publisher=iSchools | access-date=9 November 2023}}</ref>
Lesk received the ''Flame'' award for lifetime achievement from Usenix in 1994, is a Fellow of the ACM in 1996,<ref name="acm-fellow-96" /> and in 2005 was elected to the National Academy of Engineering.<ref name="nationalacademies">{{cite web| url=http://sites.nationalacademies.org/pga/brdi/pga_057264 | title=Michael Lesk: Rutgers University | website=nationalacademies.org | publisher=National Academy of Engineering | access-date=9 December 2017 }}</ref> He has authored a number of books.<ref name="amazon">{{cite web| url=https://www.amazon.co.uk/Books-Michael-E-Lesk/s?ie=UTF8&page=1&rh=n%3A266239%2Cp_27%3AMichael%20E.%20Lesk | title=Books: Michael E. Lesk | website=Amazon.co.uk | access-date=9 December 2017 }}</ref>
==See also== * Lesk algorithm
==Bibliography== Selected books by Michael Lesk:<ref name="amazon" /> * ''Practical Digital Libraries: Books, Bytes, and Bucks'', 1997. {{ISBN|978-1-55860-459-9}}. * ''Understanding Digital Libraries'', 2nd ed., December 2004. {{ISBN|978-1-55860-924-2}}.
==References== {{reflist}}
==External links== * [http://www.lesk.com/ Michael Lesk personal website] * {{DBLP|l/Lesk:Michael_E=}}
{{Authority control}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Lesk, Michael}} Category:1945 births Category:Living people Category:Harvard College alumni Category:American computer programmers Category:Scientists at Bell Labs Category:Rutgers University faculty Category:Unix people Category:Members of the United States National Academy of Engineering Category:Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery Category:Troff Category:Computational linguistics researchers Category:Data miners