Gérard Huet

Gérard Pierre Huet (born July 7, 1947, in Bourges, France) is a French computer scientist, linguist and mathematician who holds the position of senior research director at INRIA, the French National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology, and is a member of the French Academy of Sciences and Academia Europaea. He led the Formel project in the 1980s that developed the typed functional programming language Caml, and led the Coq proof assistant project in the 1990s alongside Christine Paulin-Mohring. He authored foundational work on unification for the simply typed lambda calculus, named and popularized the zipper data structure in 1997, and designed the calculus of constructions in 1984 with Thierry Coquand, who completed his own PhD under Huet's supervision. He received the Herbrand Award in 1998 and the EATCS Award in 2009.