Generative linguistics has a longer prehistory than most linguists realize. The rewriting systems that Chomsky brought into linguistics as generative grammars were explicitly defined more than a century ago, as part of a project to formalize inference rules in logic, and were later applied to studying mathematical properties of certain kinds of infinite sets. Their developer was the mathematician and logician Emil Leon Post, whose work was inspired by Clarence Irving Lewis and Cassius Jackson Keyser. Post also proved the first two theorems about what linguists now call generative capacity. The idea of deploying Post’s systems within linguistics was first suggested in 1950 by the logician Paul Rosenbloom. I review the relevant pre-1950 work, and explore the reasons for its having remained so little known among linguists.
"Founded at the beginning of the 90s, the Ensemble Kérylos, directed by Annie Bélis, is dedicated to Ancient Greek and Roman Music. It plays only authentic scores as accurately as possible, using instruments that are faithfully reconstructed."
"In the study widely claimed to show that there is no safe level of alcohol for the brain, going from zero to one alcohol unit (half a drink per day) was not associated with any harm in females, and was associated with slightly better brain markers in males."
"Peter and I had been in the same 1982 incoming class at
Carnegie Mellon. We knew each other, but were not really close. I
bumped into Peter in the Computer Science lounge a few weeks
before the Fredkin Masters Open, and mentioned what I was
doing. Peter was asking a lot of questions, but I had no idea that
he was thinking about getting IBM to hire us.
Years later, Peter described how he got the upper management
in IBM interested in continuing the project inside IBM. It was
around the time of the Superbowl season. Peter happened to be in
the men's room with Abe Peled, the IBM Research Vice President of
Computer Science. They started talking about how expensive the
Superbowl TV commercial spots were. Peter suggested that he
knew a way to gain much greater publicity at far lower cost. He
knew this group of graduate students working on computer chess
at Carnegie Mellon, and he believed that this team would create
the first chess machine to beat the World Champion. Given the
historical significance of the quest, and the latent public interest,
IBM could stand to gain huge advertising value from the endeav-
or. Oh, yes, members of the team were world-class people that IBM
would be interested in hiring anyway. Abe got interested and asked
Peter to look into it."
"In the end, the name Deep Blue was chosen, submitted by Peter Brown, that same classmate who was partially responsible for our being hired by IBM. For winning the contest, Peter was treated to a nice dinner with us, and a chance to play Deep Thought. He declined the second part of his award."
Feng-hsiung Hsu, Behind Deep Blue
I've never made the link between that Peter Brown and Rentec... Also he confirms a lot of anecdotes from The Man Who Solved the Market by Gregory Zuckerman.
From the Statistical Consequences of Fat Tails (N. Taleb):
"We will address ad nauseam the central limit theorem but here is the initial intuition. It states that
n-summed independent random variables with finite second moment end up looking like a Gaussian
distribution. Nice story, but how fast? Power laws on paper need an infinity of such summands, meaning
they never really reach the Gaussian. Chapter 7 deals with the limiting distributions and answers the
central question: "how fast?" both for CLT and LLN. How fast is a big deal because in the real world we
have something different from n equals infinity."