Michael Lesk
Emeritus Professor of Library and Information Science
Emeritus Faculty
Biography
Michael Lesk received the Ph.D. degree in Chemical Physics in 1969, and went on to Bell Labs, Bellcore, NSF, and Rutgers. He has worked in digital libraries, Unix software, information economics, and digital preservation.
Lesk is a computer scientist who worked for the SMART Information Retrieval System project, did many of the retrieval experiments, and wrote much of its retrieval code. He participated with the group at Bell Labs that built Unix, created Unix tools for word processing, developed LEX for compiling in UNIX, introduced the Lesk algorithm, a classical algorithm for word sense disambiguation, authored the Portable I/O Library, and assisted in the development of the C language preprocessor.
Education
Ph.D., Chemical Physics, Harvard University
M.A., Harvard University
B.A., Chemistry and Physics, Harvard University