29 Facts About Warren Weaver

Warren Weaver was an American scientist, mathematician, and science administrator.

Warren Weaver is widely recognized as one of the pioneers of machine translation and as an important figure in creating support for science in the United States.

Warren Weaver became an assistant professor of mathematics at Throop College.

Warren Weaver served as a second lieutenant in the Air Service during World War I After the war, he returned to teach mathematics at Wisconsin.

Warren Weaver was given an honorary LLD degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Doctor of Science degree from the University of Sao Paulo.

Warren Weaver was director of the Division of Natural Sciences at the Rockefeller Foundation, and was science consultant, trustee, and vice president at the Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research.

Warren Weaver was familiar with the development of electronic calculating machines and the successful application of mathematical and statistical techniques in cryptography.

Warren Weaver has served as a member of the Department of War's Research Advisory Panel and the Naval Research Advisory Committee.

Warren Weaver was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1944.

Warren Weaver was president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1954 and chairman of the board in 1955, a member or chairman of numerous boards and committees, and the primary author of the Arden House Statement, a 1951 declaration of principle and guide to setting the association's goals, plans, and procedures.

Warren Weaver served as vice-president of the board of trustees of the Academy of Religion and Mental Health and chairman of the board of the Salk Institute of Biological Studies.

Warren Weaver was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1958.

When Claude Shannon's 1948 articles on communication theory were republished in 1949 as The Mathematical Theory of Communication, the book republished a much shorter article authored by Warren Weaver, which discusses the implications of Shannon's more technical work for a general audience.

Warren Weaver authored the books Lady Luck: The Theory of Probability, first published in 1963 and republished in 1982, Elementary Mathematical Analysis, and an autobiography called Scene of Change.

Warren Weaver had first mentioned the possibility of using digital computers to translate documents between natural human languages in March 1947 in a letter to the cyberneticist Norbert Wiener.

The impact of Warren Weaver's memorandum is attributable not only to his widely recognized expertise in mathematics and computing, but, and perhaps even more, to the influence he enjoyed with major policy-makers in US government agencies.

Warren Weaver's memorandum was designed to suggest more fruitful methods than any simplistic word-for-word approach, which had grave limitations.

Warren Weaver proposed that this problem could be solved by looking at the words that occur in the vicinity of the word to be translated, and he conjectured that the number of context words that would be required is fairly small.

Warren Weaver interpreted these results as meaning that given a set of premises, any logical conclusion could be deduced automatically by computer.

Warren Weaver was especially impressed with the potential of Shannon's classified work on cryptography and Information theory from World War II.

Warren Weaver was inspired by Erwin Reifler, who in 1948 presented a paper entitled "the Chinese Language in the Light of Comparative Semantics" at the American Philosophical Society annual conference.

Warren Weaver's memorandum triggered immediate action from the part of other MT specialists.

Warren Weaver understood how greatly the tools and techniques of physics and chemistry could advance knowledge of biological processes, and used his position in the Rockefeller Foundation to identify, support, and encourage the young scientists who years later earned Nobel Prizes and other honours for their contributions to genetics or molecular biology.

Warren Weaver was awarded the Public Welfare Medal by the National Academy of Sciences in 1957.

Warren Weaver received the Medal for Merit, a position as an officer in the Legion of Honour, and the King's Medal for Service in the Cause of Freedom.

Warren Weaver was fascinated by Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

In 1964, having built up a collection of 160 versions in 42 languages, Warren Weaver wrote a book about the translation history of Alice, called Alice in Many Tongues: The Translations of Alice in Wonderland.

Ever the scientist, even in the area of literature, Warren Weaver devised a design for evaluating the quality of the various translations, focusing on the nonsense, puns and logical jokes in the Mad Tea-Party scene.

The book Alice in a World of Wonderlands continues and updates Warren Weaver's endeavour, analyzing Alice translations in 174 languages in a similar vein.