Lejaren Hiller

Lejaren Hiller (1924-1994) was an American composer and chemist, born in New York City, who taught at the University of Illinois and later at the University at Buffalo. He is known as a pioneer of computer music: with Leonard Isaacson he wrote the Illiac Suite (1957) for string quartet, generated on the ILLIAC I computer at Illinois. Hiller studied chemistry at Princeton, where he also took composition with Roger Sessions and Milton Babbitt, and worked as a research chemist at DuPont from 1947 to 1952.