User talk:QTJ/Drafts/Marcel Schützenberger (Biography Rewrite Draft)

Request: Any editor who adds to this list (please don't take away) -- please stick to the format below.

General findings

 * Computer science database entries


 * List of his publications


 * Postscript format obituary (source of statements on his impact for later?)


 * ACM -- An entire issue of Theoretical Computer Science Papers dedicated to his memory


 * At least one other theorem bears his co-name.
 * Note: This same use of the term by different authors. And these. Co-named with Kleene and Chomsky in theorem names seems pretty impactful.


 * Has a soley-named theorem noted as "well-known" in the field.


 * Recognized contributions to medicine.

Chomsky-connection via Dyck Language theorem
"As noted by [Parnas et al.], these languages [that is, the Dyck languages] are interesting for a several of reasons: they describe a property that should be held by most programming languages, and furthermore, every context-free language can be mapped to a restrictive subset of Dn, per the Chomsky-Schützenberger Theorem (q.v. [Chomsky & Schützenberger] ). Also, as explored by [Nebel] and others, Dyck-specific algorithms exist that can accept many such languages in sublinear time."

Sourced statements about his contributions to maths
From [Wilf et al.]:


 * "... one of the most creative and influential combinatorialists of this century ..." -- Herbert Wilf(Also has an entry on Wikipedia).


 * "His contributions to combinatorics are wide ranging and of the first magnitude. In the theory of Young tableaux he discovered the jeu de taquin that became the basis for so many later investigations; he illuminated the Schensted correspondence between pairs of permutations and tableaux by revealing many facets of its fine structure; he created the subject of context-free languages and explored some of its many consequences, as well as finding many results in the theory of combinatorial words and languages of other kinds; with Foata he developed a general theory of counting families of unlabeled combinatoral objects by factoring them into primes, etc. His work has found important and numerous applications. For example his theory of formal languages has spawned many fine successes in the enumeration of various kinds of polyominoes and cellular structures and his work on factorization of families of unlabeled objects has been responsible for methods of selecting such objects at random." -- Wilf (ibid.)
 * Note: Each of the asserations made by Wilf above are easily checked -- he provides breadcrumbs in those names above.


 * "... indeed a versatile mind, keeping abreast of the scientific developments of his time." -- Dominique Foata (Combinatorial mathematician)
 * Note: This would be the Foata mentioned by Wilf, above.


 * "... he built a solid reputation in Paris as the world figure in the theory of Formal Languages and Theoretical Computer Science..." -- Foata (ibid.)


 * "The starting point of Marco's work in Computer Science was the theory of variable length codes. He published in 1955 a paper (`Une théorie algébrique du codage') presented at the algebra seminar in Paris which already contains many of the ideas of his work on automata. For example, one finds in this paper the definition of the syntactic semigroup, of recognizable sets and their equality with rational sets, actually almost simultaneously with the appearance of Kleene's work. The problem of understanding the nature of the property of unique decipherability fascinated him from the beginning. He found there an incredible interplay between algebra through the use of finite semigroups, probability theory and combinatorics. Many of his favourite subjects were put together. Later he published a series of results on variable-length codes all of them reported in our book with Jean Berstel (Theory of Codes, Academic Press, 1984). To single out just one of them, I would quote the theorem expressing that a finite maximal code either is prefix or has an infinite deciphering delay (J. Comb. Th., 1, 1966, 437-442). His ideas on codes led him later on to several deep results on rational functions and transducers.


 * "It was also very early that Marco Schützenberger began to work on context-free grammars. The famous Chomsky-Schützenberger theorem asserting that any context-free language is a coding of a simple Dyck language appeared in 1963." -- Dominique Perrin (Mathematician).


 * "In algebra, he has deeply influenced the theory of semigoups." -- Perrin (ibid.)


 * "Marco's coding of MacMahon's inversion statistic on words via non-commutative multiplication once seemed like a weird way of doing something which had a beautiful analytic structure. Now it is seen as central to the development of some important examples of quantum groups." -- Richard Askey (Mathematician. Has entry on Wikipedia.)

Sourced statements about his views on Darwinism
From [Wilf et al.]:


 * "Throughout his life Marco was interested in (and therefore passionately interested in) the many flaws in the Darwinian theory of evolution as it is commonly presented. In 1967 he participated in a remarkable conference at the Wistar Institute of the University of Pennsylvania, which brought together a collection of renowned physical scientists and mathematicians, on the one hand, and life scientists, on the other. At that meeting Marco became one of the first distinguished scientists in the world to point out that a theory of evolution that depends on uniformly randomly occurring mutations cannot be the truth because the number of mutations needed to create the speciation that we observe, and the time that would be needed for those mutations to have happened by chance, exceed by thousands of orders of magnitude the time that has been available." -- Wilf (ibid.)
 * Note: More breadcrumbs, and a link to interview with "Marco" (link now appears dead) that may be findable in some other form: http://www.larecherche.fr/FOR/C9601/jan96_art086.html.


 * "... Marco was deeply involved in his struggle against the votaries of Darwinism. His other bête noire was Artificial Intelligence. When he was asked to contribute to the volume Le Savant et la Foi in which 'nineteen scientists were invited to express why they were Christian and how they made their scholarly work compatible with their faith' Marco sent a paper entitled ' Intelligence artificielle, néo-darwinisme et principe anthropique. ' The paper is not a theological essay, but a convincing analysis of the failures of to-day's cosmological theories, neo-Darwinism, with or without the help of Artificial Intelligence!" -- Foata (ibid.)


 * "He had in 1979 arranged for me to spend a year at Paris so that we might work together on a book devoted to the Darwinian theory of evolution. We met almost every day. He talked and I listened. His conversation ranged over every conceivable intellectual topic. At the end of the year, I had compiled a mass of notes, but our book was never finished." -- David Berlinski (Has page on Wikipedia.)

Sourced statements about how controversial the above views were relative to the scientific community
From [Wilf et al.]:


 * "Was Marco a believer? We had many discussions about religion in the past, but they are too personal to be reported in this note." -- Foata (ibid.)
 * Note: Keep in mind, this was an In Memoriam.