Lambert Meertens


Lambert Guillaume Louis Théodore Meertens or L.G.L.T. Meertens is a Dutch computer scientist and professor. He is currently a researcher at the Kestrel Institute, a nonprofit computer science research center in Palo Alto's Stanford Research Park.

Life and career

As a student at the Ignatius Gymnasium in Amsterdam, Meertens designed a computer with Kees Koster, a classmate. In the 1960s, Meertens applied affix grammars to the description and composition of music, and obtained a special prize from the jury at the 1968 International Federation for Information Processing Congress in Edinburgh for his computer-generated string quartet, "Quartet No. 1 in C Major for 2 Violins, Viola and Violoncello", based on the first non-context-free affix grammar. The string quartet was published as Mathematical Centre Report MR 96 in 1968.
Meertens was one of the editors of the Revised ALGOL 68 Report. He was the originator and one of the designers of the ABC programming language. He was chairman of the Dutch Pacifist Socialist Party from 1975 until 1981. He was co-designer of the Bird–Meertens formalism, along with Richard Bird, who also "gifted" him the Meertens number. From 1999 to 2009, he chaired the IFIP Working Group 2.1 on Algorithmic Languages and Calculi.
His original work was at the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. He is a Professor Emeritus at Utrecht University in Utrecht, The Netherlands. He currently works as a researcher at the Kestrel Institute in Palo Alto.

Awards