| Yehoshua Bar-hillel |
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Yehoshua Bar-Hillel ( 1915 Wien – 1975 Jerusalem ) was a Philosopher , Mathematician , and Linguist at the Hebrew University Of Jerusalem , best known for his pioneering work in Machine Translation and formal Linguistics . Bar-Hillel was raised in Berlin . In 1933 he emigrated to the Palestine with the Bnei Akiva youth movement, and briefly joined the Kibbutz Tirat-Zvi before settling in Jerusalem and marrying Shulamith. During WWII , he served in the Jewish Brigade of the British Army. He fought with the Hagganah during the Israeli War Of Independence , losing an eye. Bar-Hillel received his PhD in Philosophy from the Hebrew University where he also studied mathematics under Abraham Fraenkel , with whom he eventually coauthored ''Foundations of Set Theory'' (1958, 1973). Bar-Hillel was a major disciple of Rudolf Carnap , whose ''Logical Syntax of Language'' much influenced him. He began a correspondence with Carnap in the 1940s, which led to a 1950 postdoc under Carnap at the University Of Chicago , and to his collaborating on Carnap's 1952 ''An Outline of the Theory of Semantic Information''. Bar-Hillel then took up a position at MIT , leaving in 1953 just before Noam Chomsky 's arrival. At MIT, Bar-Hillel was the first academic to work full-time in the field of Machine Translation , Bar-Hillel organised the first International Conference on Machine Translation in 1952 . Later he expressed doubts that general-purpose fully-automatic high-quality machine translation would ever be feasible. He was also a pioneer in the field of Information Retrieval . In 1953, Bar-Hillel joined the Philosophy department at the Hebrew University , where he taught until his untimely death at age 60. His teachings and writings strongly influenced an entire generation of Israeli philosophers and linguists, including Assa Kasher and Avishai Margalit . In 1953, he founded a pioneering algebraic-computational linguistic group, and in 1961 he contributed to the proof of the Pumping Lemma for Context-free Languages (sometimes called the Bar-Hillel lemma). Bar-Hillel helped found the Hebrew University's department of Philosophy Of Science . From 1966 to 1968 Bar-Hillel presided over the International Association of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science. Bar-Hillel's daughter Maya Bar-Hillel is a Cognitive Psychologist at the Hebrew University , known for her collaborations with Amos Tversky and for her role in critiquing Bible Code study; his daughter Mira Bar-Hillel is the Property Correspondent for the London Evening Standard . RELATED TERMS SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
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