Paul Smolensky

PAUL SMOLENSKY, a Krieger-Eisenhower Professor, is internationally renowned for his work in formal theoretical approaches to linguistics, in particular for having developed, with Alan Prince of Rutgers, a novel formal characterization of the complex rule systems of grammar called Optimality Theory. This theory provides a new computational architecture for human language, based in mathematical theories of computation in the brain. Dr. Smolensky has been a member of the Cognitive Science Department since 1994, and served as chair between 1997 and 2000. Since 1994, he has been assistant director of the Center for Language and Speech Processing. The author or editor of more than 100 articles and seven books, his innovative formal contributions to cognitive science and linguistics have been recognized by the award of numerous prizes, most recently that of the David E. Rumelhart Prize for Theoretical Contributions to Cognitive Science in 2005.