Lambert Meertens

Lambert Meertens is a Dutch computer scientist, born on 10 May 1944 in Amsterdam, who is professor emeritus of software technology at Utrecht University and, as of 2021, a researcher at the Kestrel Institute in Palo Alto, California. His early work was at the Mathematical Centre, now the Centrum Wiskunde and Informatica, in Amsterdam. In the 1960s he applied affix grammars to the description and composition of music, and a computer-generated string quartet won him a special jury prize at the 1968 IFIP Congress in Edinburgh. He was one of the editors of the Revised ALGOL 68 Report and the originator and one of the designers of the programming language ABC, the incidental predecessor of Python. With Richard Bird he co-designed the Bird-Meertens formalism. He chaired IFIP Working Group 2.1 on Algorithmic Languages and Calculi from 1999 to 2009 and received the IFIP Silver Core in 2007 and the IFIP Outstanding Service Award in 2015.