| Frederick Parker-Rhodes | |
|---|---|
| Born | 21 November 1914 Newington, Yorkshire |
| Died | 2 March 1987 (aged 72) |
| Residence | UK |
| Nationality | British |
| Fields | Mycology, Plant Pathology, Mathematics, Linguistics, Computer Science |
| Known for | Contributions to computational linguistics, combinatorial physics, bit-string physics, plant pathology, and mycology |
| Author abbreviation (botany) | Park.-Rhodes |
Frederick Parker-Rhodes (21 March 1914–21 November 1987) was an English linguist, plant pathologist, computer scientist, mathematician, mystic, and mycologist.
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Arthur Frederick Parker-Rhodes was born in Newington, Yorkshire on 21 March 1914. He was educated at Marlborough College and Magdalene College, Cambridge, from where he graduated in 1934 and subsequently received his PhD. Being of independent means, he was able to pursue a variety of interests.[1][2] He married author and political activist Damaris Parker-Rhodes and the couple earned a reputation as "bohemians" and eccentrics.[3] They were both members of the Communist Party (Klaus Fuchs stayed with them in Cambridge),[3] but became disillusioned with communism and in 1948 joined the Society of Friends.[4]
During the Second World War, Parker-Rhodes worked as a plant pathologist at Long Ashton Research Station from where he published a series of research papers on the mechanism of fungicidal actions. His personal interest, however, was in the larger fungi, particularly agarics (mushrooms and toadstools), and he was a familiar figure at forays of the British Mycological Society in the 1940s and 1950s. He even published a statistical survey of these forays. For nearly 30 years Parker-Rhodes tutored a course on fungi at the Flatford Mill Field Studies Centre in Suffolk and, in 1950, published a popular book, Fungi, friends and foes.[5] Subsequently, he produced papers studying the kinetics of fairy rings and a series surveying the larger fungi of Skokholm, an island off the western coast of Wales.[2] He described several taxa new to science, including the species now known as Trechispora clanculare (Park.-Rhodes) K.H. Larss. which he found in a puffin burrow.
Parker-Rhodes was an accomplished linguist and mastered at least 23 languages, claiming that they became "easier after the first half-dozen".[6] He was introduced to Chinese and formal linguistic syntax by Michael Halliday at Cambridge.[6] Parker-Rhodes was also a mathematician, with a particular interest in statistics. Both these areas of expertise were of use to him when he joined the Cambridge Language Research Unit, an independent research centre established in 1955 by Margaret Masterman. The unit was said to house "an extraordinary collection of eccentrics" engaged in research on language and computing, including information retrieval.[6] Parker-Rhodes' colleagues at CLRU included Roger Needham, Karen Spärck Jones, Ted Bastin, Stuart Linney, and Yorick Wilks.
Parker-Rhodes was "an original thinker in information retrieval, quantum mechanics and computational linguistics."[6] He is mainly remembered for his contribution to combinatorial physics, based on his elucidation of "combinatorial hierarchy", a mathematical structure of bit-strings generated by an algorithm based on discrimination (exclusive-or between bits).[1] He published some of his ideas in this field in the book The Theory of Indistinguishables (1981).[7] Parker-Rhodes also co-authored papers with Needham on the "theory of clumps" in relation to information retrieval and computational linguistics.[8] He wrote a book on language, Inferential Semantics, published in 1978.[9]
He was a member of the Alternative Natural Philosophy Association, a group of physicists and mathematicians who met up in Cambridge in the 1960s and created a semi-formal association in 1978. Other key members included H. Pierre Noyes, Ted Bastin, and Clive W. Kilmister.[10] The association sponsored a series of Parker-Rhodes memorial lectures in the 1990s.[6][11]
His Times obituarist, Ted Bastin, says of Parker-Rhodes' personality and scientific contribution: "One must say, in sum, that Parker-Rhodes leaves us with an enigma - a situation to which he brought his characteristic gentle and slightly amused acquiescence.".[1]
At the time of his death, Parker-Rhodes had been working on a book, The Inevitable Universe, that combined elements of metaphysics with mathematics.[11] He had previously published a pamphlet, Wholesight: The Spirit Quest (1978), that explored mythical tales and parables in an attempt to bring science and religion together.[4] He also produced a long poem, The Myth of the Rock, of a spiritual nature.[12] His daughter, Oriole Parker-Rhodes, has electronically published some of the stories he told to his children.[13] The library of the Society of Friends in London holds a typescript "The wheel of creation : an essay in wholesight, towards a coherent model of the place of mankind in the cosmos" [14]