Yehoshua Bar-Hillel (born
1915 in
Vienna; died
1975 in
Jerusalem) was a
philosopher, mathematician, and
linguist at the
Hebrew University of Jerusalem, best known for his pioneering work in
machine translation and formal
linguistics.
Born
Oscar Westreich, he was raised in
Berlin. In
1933 he emigrated to the
Palestine with the
Bnei Akiva youth movement, and briefly joined the
kibbutz Tirat-Zvi before settling in Jerusalem and marrying Shulamith.
During
World War II, he served in the
Jewish Brigade of the British Army. He fought with the
Haganah during the
Israeli War of Independence, losing an eye.
Bar-Hillel received his PhD in Philosophy from the
Hebrew University where he also studied mathematics under
Abraham Fraenkel, with whom he eventually coauthored
Foundations of Set Theory (1958, 1973).
Bar-Hillel was a major disciple of
Rudolf Carnap, whose
Logical Syntax of Language much influenced him. He began a correspondence with Carnap in the 1940s, which led to a 1950 postdoc under Carnap at the
University of Chicago, and to his collaborating on Carnap's 1952
An Outline of the Theory of Semantic Information.
Bar-Hillel then took up a position at
MIT, leaving in 1953 just before
Noam Chomsky's arrival. At MIT, Bar-Hillel was the first academic to work full-time in the field of
Machine Translation; he organised the first International Conference on Machine Translation in
1952. Later he expressed doubts that general-purpose fully-automatic high-quality machine translation would ever be feasible. He was also a pioneer in the field of
information retrieval.
In 1953, Bar-Hillel joined the
philosophy department at the
Hebrew University, where he taught until his untimely death at age 60. His teachings and writings strongly influenced an entire generation of Israeli philosophers and linguists, including
Asa Kasher and
Avishai Margalit. In 1953, he founded a pioneering algebraic-computational linguistic group, and in
1961 he contributed to the proof of the
pumping lemma for
context-free languages (sometimes called the Bar-Hillel lemma). Bar-Hillel helped found the Hebrew University's department of
Philosophy of Science. From 1966 to 1968 Bar-Hillel presided over the International Association of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science.
Bar-Hillel's daughter
Maya Bar-Hillel is a
cognitive psychologist at the
Hebrew University, known for her collaborations with
Amos Tversky and for her role in critiquing
Bible code study; his daughter
Mira Bar-Hillel is the Property Correspondent for the London
Evening Standard. His granddaughter, Gili Bar-Hillel, is the Hebrew translator of the
Harry Potter series.
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