Michael E. Lesk (born 1945) is an Americancomputer scientist.

In the 1960s, Michael Lesk worked for theSMART Information Retrieval System project, wrote much of its retrieval code and did many of the retrieval experiments, as well as obtaining aBA degree in Physics and Chemistry fromHarvard College in 1964 and aPhD fromHarvard University inChemical Physics in 1969.^[2][3]

From 1970 to 1984, Lesk worked atBell Labs in the group that builtUnix. Lesk wrote Unix tools for word processing (tbl,refer, and the standardms macro package, all fortroff), for compiling (Lex), and for networking (uucp). He also wrote the Portable I/O Library (the predecessor tostdio.h inC) and contributed significantly to the development of theC language preprocessor.^[4]

In 1984, he left to work forBellcore, where he managed the computer science research group.^[2] There, Lesk worked on specific information systems applications, mostly withgeography (a system for driving directions) anddictionaries (a system fordisambiguating words in context).In the 1990s, Lesk worked on a large chemical information system, the CORE project, withCornell,Online Computer Library Center,American Chemical Society, andChemical Abstracts Service.From 1998 to 2002, Lesk headed theNational 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.^[3][5][6]

Lesk received theFlame award for lifetime achievement fromUsenix in 1994, is a Fellow of theACM in 1996,^[1] and in 2005 was elected to theNational Academy of Engineering.^[7] He has authored a number of books.^[8]

• Lesk algorithm

Selected books by Michael Lesk:^[8]

• 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.

• Michael Lesk personal website
• Mike Lesk atDBLP Bibliography Server

• 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

• Articles with short description
• Short description is different from Wikidata
• Articles with hCards