Rajmund Piotrowski

17.08. 1922 — 4.08. 2009

Raimund Piotrowski was a Soviet and Russian scholar − philologist, whose sphere of interest were such fields as Romance philology, quantitative linguistics and natural text processing. He was the initiator of such schools of evidentiary-based philology as language engineering and linguistic synergetics, originator of linguistic automata theory. Under his supervision the first experimental systems of linguistic technologies (natural text processing systems and practical multilanguage systems of machine translation) were created in the Soviet Union.

R. Piotrowski was the author of more than 300 studies, among which were the following scientific and text books: "Article Formation in Romance Languages", "Language Engineering and Language Theory", "Text, Computer, Person", "Mathematical Linguistics", " Linguistic Automata", "Linguistic Synergetics. Reference Positions, First Results, Perspectives", he was a scientific editor of the international encyclopedia "Quaintitative Linguistik. Ein internationales Handbuch".

134 PhD and 14 full doctor theses were defended under his scientific supervision.

R. Piotrowski was the creator and chief of "Speech statistics" International Group and Language Engineering Laboratory in the Leningrad State Pedagogical Institute named after A. I. Herzen. Within 1948-1954 and 1966-1974 he was the dean of foreign languages department in this Institute and the chair of French, Spanish, and then Romance Philology Chairs. In the Herzen State Pedagogical University R. Piotrowski was the chief of Applied Linguistics Unit with two laboratories: Language Engineering Laboratory and Machine Translation Laboratory, he organized an Interuniversity Centre of Theoretical and Applied Computer Research in Philology and was its permanent director.