Jean Baudot

In the late 1950s, JEAN A. BAUDOT (1929–2001), a young engineer, was hired to manage the computers in the statistics centre attached to the mathematics department at the Université de Montréal . In 1964, his experiment in electronic literature, La Machine à écrire, was published. That same year, he co-founded the university’s first computer science centre, becoming the director in 1971. Increasingly interested in linguistics, in 1978 Baudot left computer science for the linguistics department, where he was hired as a professor. In his lifetime, he produced a number of language-manipulation software programmes and published many articles and books in the field where language and mathematics intersect.