Today, let's see what mathematics can tell us about language.
The University of Houston Mathematics Department presents this
program about the machines that make our civilization run, and
the people whose ingenuity created them. In the novel The Count
of Monte Cristo, one of the most memorable characters is
Monsieur Noirtier de Villefort. He is completely paralyzed and
mute, and yet is able to communicate by blinking his eyes. The
system he uses is slow and laborious, and involves running
through columns and columns of words in a dictionary. When I
first read the novel, I wandered how this could be done more
efficiently? Could people capable of only minimal movement
communicate with the same speed as you and me? To achieve this,
we need a good understanding of the structure of language. But
how can we describe the structure of something so vast and
complex as language itself? After all, our languages are
sufficiently flexible to capture nearly all of our thoughts and
feelings. However, they do obey very preci