Mike Lesk

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.

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.

In 1984, he left to work for Bellcore, where he managed the computer science research group.

Lesk received the Flame award for lifetime achievement from Usenix in 1994, is a Fellow of the ACM in 1996, He has authored a number of books.