Warren Weaver

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Warren Weaver (born July 17, 1894 in Reedsburg , Wisconsin , † November 24, 1978 in New Milford , Connecticut ) was an American mathematician and the father of machine translation . Together with Claude Shannon , he was the founder of information theory .

Weaver studied at the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a bachelor's degree in 1916 and a degree in civil engineering in 1917 and received his doctorate there in 1921. He became an assistant professor of mathematics at Throop College (later Caltech ), served as a lieutenant in the Air Force during World War I and was then a mathematics teacher in Wisconsin. In 1932 he became director of the natural sciences department of the Rockefeller Foundation, which he remained until 1955. From 1947 he was a consultant, from 1954 a trustee and from 1958 vice president of the Sloan Kettering Institute for Cancer Research.

In 1949 he submitted a series of essays on computer machine translation known as the Weaver Memorandum. In it, he formulated goals and ideas for performing machine translation before most had even understood what computers would be able to do. He made four basic assumptions to overcome simplistic word-for-word translation:

  1. the translation must be done from the context;
  2. there is a logical component in language;
  3. cryptographic methods can be used;
  4. there are universal linguistic givens.

Weaver was married with two children.

In 1949 he published with Claude Shannon an anthology of Shannon's essays on information theory, in which he explained information theory to a more general audience in his contribution.

Warren Weaver was awarded the Kalinga Prize for Popularizing Science in 1964. Since 1931 he was a fellow of the American Physical Society . He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1944, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1958, and the National Academy of Sciences in 1969.

Fonts

  • With CE Shannon: The Mathematical Theory of Communication . Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1949.
  • Science and Complexity. American Scientist, 36: 536 (1948).
  • Alice in Many Tongues: The Translations of Alice in Wonderland. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1964.
  • Lady Luck: The theory of probability , Dover 1963 (German: Die Glücksgöttin - The coincidence and the laws of probability, Munich, Vienna, Basel: Kurt Desch GmbH, 1964)
  • with Max Mason: The electromagnetic field , University of Chicago Press 1929, Dover 1952

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Member History: Warren Weaver. American Philosophical Society, accessed November 15, 2018 .
  2. ^ Member Directory: Warren Weaver. National Academy of Sciences, accessed December 1, 2015 (with link: Biographical Memoir).

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Weaver, Warren
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American information scientist
DATE OF BIRTH July 17, 1894
PLACE OF BIRTH Reedsburg , Wisconsin
DATE OF DEATH November 24, 1978
Place of death New Milford , Connecticut