Lambert Meertens

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Lambert Meertens is a Dutch computer scientist and professor.

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 IFIP 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 Algol68 Report. He was the originator and one of the designers of the ABC programming language. He was chairman of the Dutch Pacifist Socialist Party (PSP) from 1975 until 1981. He was co-designer of the Bird-Meertens Formalism. He is chair of IFIP Working Group 2.1 on Algorithmic Languages and Calculi.

His original work was at the CWI in Amsterdam, The Netherlands (originally called the Mathematical Centre). He was later researcher at the Kestrel Institute in Palo Alto, USA. He is professor at Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands.

Meertens has an Erdős number of 3.