Marcel-Paul Schützenberger

Marcel-Paul "Marco" Schützenberger (24 October 1920 – 29 July 1996) was a French mathematician and Doctor of Medicine. He worked in the fields of formal language, combinatorics, and information theory.[1] In addition to his formal results in mathematics, he was "deeply involved in [a] struggle against the votaries of [neo-]Darwinism",[2] a stance which has resulted in some mixed reactions from his peers and from critics of his stance on evolution. Several notable theorems and objects in mathematics as well as computer science bear his name (for example Schutzenberger group or the Chomsky–Schützenberger hierarchy). Paul Schützenberger was his great-grandfather.

Marcel-Paul Schützenberger
Schützenberger in 1972
Born(1920-10-24)24 October 1920
Paris
Died29 July 1996(1996-07-29) (aged 75)
Paris
NationalityFrench
Alma materUniversity of Paris
Known for
Scientific career
FieldsMathematics
InstitutionsUniversity of Paris
Doctoral advisorGeorges Darmois
Albert Châtelet
Doctoral studentsJean Berstel
Dominique Foata
Alain Lascoux
Maurice Nivat
Dominique Perrin

In the late 1940s, he was briefly married to the psychologist Anne Ancelin Schützenberger.[3]

Contributions to medicine and biology

Schützenberger's first doctorate, in medicine, was awarded in 1948 from the Faculté de Médecine de Paris.[4] His doctoral thesis, on the statistical study of biological sex at birth, was distinguished by the Baron Larrey Prize from the French Academy of Medicine.[5]

Biologist Jaques Besson, a co-author with Schützenberger on a biological topic,[6] while noting that Schützenberger is perhaps most remembered for work in pure mathematical fields, credits him[5] for likely being responsible for the introduction of statistical sequential analysis in French hospital practice.[7]

Contributions to mathematics, computer science, and linguistics

Schützenberger's second doctorate was awarded in 1953 from Université Paris III.[8] This work, developed from earlier results[9][10] is counted amongst the early influential French academic work in information theory.[11] His later impact in both linguistics and combinatorics is reflected by two theorems in formal linguistics (the Chomsky–Schützenberger enumeration theorem[12] 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,[13][14] reflected in the name of the combinatorial structure called by some the Lascoux–Schützenberger tree.[15][16]

In automata theory, Schützenberger is credited with first defining (what later became known as) weighted automata, the first studied model of automata which compute a quantitative output.[17]

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.[1]

Offices, honors, and recognitions
Professorships and other teaching[1]
National honors
Posthumous recognitions

After his death, two journals in theoretical mathematics dedicated issues to Schützenberger's memory. He was commemorated in this manner by Theoretical Computer Science in 1998[18] and again by the International Journal of Algebra and Computation in 1999.[19]

The mathematician David Berlinski provided this dedication in his 2000 book The Advent of The Algorithm: The Idea that Rules the World: À la mémoire de mon ami . . M. P. Schützenberger, 1921-1996.

Trivia
  • The character "Dr. Schütz" in Boris Vian's 1948 novel, Et on tuera tous les affreux, is said to have been inspired by Schützenberger.[20]
  • Together with many of his students, Schützenberger is one of the contributors of the pseudonymous collective M. Lothaire.

Works

For the complete list of his papers, see: Papers

  • De la diversité de certains cancers. Pierre Florent Denoix, Paris (1954)/About the diversity of some cancers
  • Théorie géométrique des polynômes eulériens, with Dominique Foata, Berlin, Heidelberg, New York, Springer (1970)/Geometric theory of Euler polynomials
  • Triangle de pensées, with Alain Connes and André Lichnerowicz, Paris, O. Jacob ; Saint-Gély du Fesc : Espace 34 (2000)/Triangle of thoughts
  • Les failles du darwinisme, La Recherche, n°283 (January 1996)/The miracles of darwinism
  • Œuvres complètes, edited by Jean Berstel, Alain Lascoux and Dominique Perrin, Institut Gaspard-Monge, Université Paris-Est (2009)/Complete Works

The Complete Works of Marcel-Paul Schützenberger: Complete Works

See also

References and notes
  1. Herbert Wilf, Dominique Foata, et al., "In Memoriam: Marcel-Paul Schützenberger, 1920-1996 Archived 2011-07-20 at the Wayback Machine," Electronic Journal of Combinatorics, served from University of Pennsylvania Dept. of Mathematics Server, article dated 12 October 1996, retrieved from WWW on 4 November 2006.
  2. Foata, Dominique, "In Memoriam," op. cit.
  3. "Anne Ancelin Schützenberger". orange.fr (in French). Retrieved 8 April 2018.
  4. Schützenberger, Marcel-Paul, Contribution à l'étude statistique du sexe à la naissance, Doctoral thesis, Faculté de Médecine de Paris, 2 July 1948.
  5. Besson, Jaques, "La quête de M. P. Schützenberger en Médecine et Biologie," dated March 2001, retrieved on 5 November 2006.
  6. Besson, Jaques, Gavaudan, Pierre, & Schützenberger, Marcel-Paul, "Sur l'existence d'une certaine corrélation entre le poids moléculaire des acides aminés et le nombre de triplets intervenant dans leurs codages," C. R. Acad. Sci. Paris, No. 268, pp. 1342–1344, 1969.
  7. Schützenberger, Marcel-Parul, "Une application de l'analyse séquentielle," Semaine des Hôpitaux de Paris, Vol. 25 No. 60, pp. 2562–2564, 14 August 1949.
  8. Marcel-Paul Schützenberger (1953). Contributions aux applications statistiques de la theorie de l'information (Ph.D.). Publications de l'Institut de Statistique de l'Université de Paris III. Vol. 3–117. Institut de statistique de l'universite de Paris. Record at WorldCat
  9. Ville, Jean & Schützenberger, Marcel-Paul, "Les opérations des mathématiques pures sont toutes des fonctions logiques," Comptes Rendus de l'Académie des Sciences, 232, pp. 206-207, 1951.
  10. Schützenberger, Marcel-Paul (1951). "Sur les rapports entre la quantité d'information au sens de Fisher et au sens de Wiener" (PDF). Comptes Rendus de l'Académie des Sciences. 232: 925–927.
  11. Mindell, David; et al. (2003). "From Communications Engineering to Communications Science: Cybernetics and Information Theory in the United States, France and the Soviet Union". In Walker, Mark (ed.). Science and Ideology: A Comparative History. London: Routledge. pp. 66–95. ISBN 978-0-415-27122-6.
  12. Chomsky, Noam & Schützenberger, Marcel-Paul "The Algebraic Theory of Context-Free Languages", in Computer Programming and Formal Systems, P. Braffort and D. Hirschberg (eds.), North Holland, pp. 118-161, 1963.
  13. Lascoux, Alain & Schützenberger, Marcel-Paul, "Le monoïde plaxique," in Noncommutative structures in algebra and geometric combinatorics (Naples, 1978), volume 109 of Quad. Ricerca Sci., pp. 129–156, CNR, Rome, Italy, 1981.
  14. Schützenberger, Marcel-Paul (1997). "Pour le monoïde plaxique" (PDF). Math. Inform. Sci. Humaines. 140: 5–10.
  15. Little, David (2003). "Combinatorial Aspects of the Lascoux-Schützenberger Tree". Advances in Mathematics. 174 (2): 236–253. doi:10.1016/S0001-8708(02)00038-5.
  16. Lam, Thomas; Shimozono, Mark (2006). "A Little Bijection for Affine Stanley Symmetric Functions" (PDF). Séminaire Lotharingien de Combinatoire. 54A: B54Ai. arXiv:math.CO/0601483. Bibcode:2006math......1483L.
  17. Schützenberger, M. P. (1961-09-01). "On the definition of a family of automata". Information and Control. 4 (2): 245–270. doi:10.1016/S0019-9958(61)80020-X. ISSN 0019-9958.
  18. "Special issue: papers dedicated to the memory of Marcel-Paul Schützenberger", Theoretical Computer Science, Nivat, M. & Perrin, Dominique (eds.), Vol. 204, Issues 1-2, September 1998.
  19. "Special Issue: Dedicated to the Memory of Marcel-Paul Schützenberger," International Journal of Algebra and Computation, Vol. 9, Nos. 3-4, June & August 1999. Issue at URL: https://www.worldscientific.com/toc/ijac/09/03n04
  20. See: http://www.astroline.ro/P_Marcel-Paul_Schutzenberger__145.html Archived 2007-09-29 at the Wayback Machine
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