1. Thomas Sebeok is known for his work in the development of long-term nuclear waste warning messages, in which he worked with the Human Interference Task Force to create methods for keeping the inhabitants of Earth away from buried nuclear waste that will still be hazardous 10,000 or more years in the future.
Thomas Sebeok was born on November 9,1920, in Budapest, Hungary.
Thomas Sebeok attended secondary school at the famous Fasori Gimnazium, which educated notables such as John von Neumann and Eugene Wigner.
Thomas Sebeok earned a master's degree in anthropological linguistics, under the external guidance of Roman Jakobson, at Princeton University in 1943 and, in 1945, a doctorate at Princeton University; his dissertation was titled Finnish and Hungarian case systems: their form and function.
In 1943, Thomas Sebeok started work at Indiana University in Bloomington, assisting the Amerindianist Carl Voegelin in managing the country's largest Army Specialized Training Program in foreign languages.
Thomas Sebeok then created the university's department of Uralic and Altaic Studies, covering the languages of Eastern Europe, Russia and Asia.
Thomas Sebeok was the chair of the university's Research Center for Language and Semiotic Studies.
Thomas Sebeok was among the founders of biosemiotics, and coined the term "zoosemiotics" in 1963 to describe the development of signals and signs by non-human animal species.
Thomas Sebeok continued his work as a linguist, publishing several articles and books analyzing aspects of the Mari language.
Thomas Sebeok was the editor-in-chief of the journal Semiotica, the leading periodical in the field, from its establishing in 1969 until 2001.
Thomas Sebeok was the editor of several book series and encyclopedias, including Approaches to Semiotics, Current Trends in Linguistics, and the Encyclopedic Dictionary of Semiotics.
Thomas Sebeok retired from Indiana University in 1991, but he contributed to the field of semiotics until his death in 2001.