Anthony Oettinger

Anthony Gervin Oettinger (1929 to 2022) was a German-born American linguist and computer scientist who spent his career at Harvard University, where he held a chair as Gordon McKay Professor of Applied Mathematics and was also Professor of Information Resources Policy. He completed his Harvard Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics in 1954 with a dissertation on the design of an automatic dictionary, and his early research concerned machine translation, including the syntactic ambiguity example 'Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana'. In 1951 he wrote learning programs for the EDSAC computer at Cambridge, an early use of machine learning ideas shaped by Alan Turing's views. In 1973 he co-founded Harvard's Program on Information Resources Policy and later popularised the term compunications for the merging of computing and communications. He served as president of the Association for Computing Machinery from 1966 to 1968 and advised NASA's Apollo program and several United States government bodies.