Bernard Vauquois ( – ) was a French mathematician and computer scientist. He was a pioneer of machine translation (MT) in France, most famous for his Vauquois triangle. He was a professor at the Grenoble Alpes University. Biography Bernard Vauquois was initially a researcher at CNRS from 1952 to 1958 at the Astrophysics Institute of the Meudon Observatory, after completing studies in mathematics, physics, and astronomy. Since 1957, his research program has also focused on methods applied to physics from the perspective of electronic computers, and he has taught programming to physicists. This double interest in astrophysics and electronic computers is reflected in the subject of his thesis and that of the complementary thesis in physical sciences that he defended in 1958. At 31 years old, in 1960, he was appointed professor of computer science at the Grenoble University where, with professors Jean Kuntzmann and Noël Gastinel, he began activities in computer science. At that time, he was also working on the definition of the computer language ALGOL-60. Also in 1960, he founded the CETA (Centre d'Étude pour la Traduction Automatique), later renamed as GETA (Groupe d'Étude pour la Traduction Automatique) and currently known as GETALP, a team at the Laboratoire d'informatique de Grenoble, and soon showed his gift for rapid understanding, synthesis, and innovation, as well as his taste for personal communication across linguistic borders and barriers. After visiting a number of centers, mainly in the United States, where machine translation research was conducted, he analyzed the shortcomings of the "first-generation" approach and evaluated the potential of a new generation based on grammar and formal language theory, and proposed a new approach based on a representational "pivot" and the use of (declarative) rule systems that transform a sequential sentence from one level of representation to another. He led the GETA in the construction of the first large second-generation system, applied to Russian-French, from 1962 to 1971. At the end of this period, the accumulated experience led him to correct some defects of the "pure" declarative and interlingual approach, and to use heuristic programming techniques, implemented with procedural grammars written in LSPLs ("specialized languages for linguistic programming", langages spécialisés pour la programmation linguistique) that were developed under his direction, and integrated into the ARIANE-78 machine translation system. In 1974, when he co-founded the Leibniz laboratory, he proposed "multilevel structure descriptors" for units larger than sentence translation. This idea, premonitory of