Marcel-Paul Schützenberger (nonfiction)

From Gnomon Chronicles
Jump to navigation Jump to search
Marcel-Paul Schützenberger.jpg

Marcel-Paul "Marco" Schützenberger (October 24, 1920 – July 29, 1996) was a French mathematician and Doctor of Medicine.

He worked in the fields of formal language, combinatorics, and information theory.

In addition to his formal results in mathematics, he was "deeply involved in [a] struggle against the votaries of [neo-]Darwinism", a stance which has resulted in some mixed reactions from his peers and from critics of his stance on evolution.

Biologist Jaques Besson, a co-author with Schützenberger on a biological topic, while noting that Schützenberger is perhaps most remembered for work in pure mathematical fields, credits him for likely being responsible for the introduction of statistical sequential analysis in French hospital practice.

Schützenberger did early influential French academic work in information theory.

His later impact in both linguistics and combinatorics is reflected by two theorems in formal linguistics (the Chomsky–Schützenberger enumeration theorem and the Chomsky–Schützenberger representation theorem), and one in combinatorics (the Schützenberger theorem).

With Alain Lascoux, Schützenberger is credited with the foundation of the notion of the plactic monoid, reflected in the name of the combinatorial structure called by some the Lascoux–Schützenberger tree.

The mathematician Dominique Perrin credited Schützenberger with "deeply [influencing] the theory of semigroups", and "deep results on rational functions and transducers," amongst other contributions to mathematics.

Paul Schützenberger was his great-grandfather.

In the News

Fiction cross-reference

Nonfiction cross-reference

External links