Anthony G. Oettinger

From Nuremberg to Harvard

Anthony “Tony” Gervin Oettinger was a German-born American linguist and computer scientist whose life spanned the rise of modern computing and the shift from analog communications to digital systems. He was born on March 29, 1929, in Nuremberg, Germany, to a French mother and German father. Nuremberg was the city where Hitler first built his political base and the home of the Nazi party. Oettinger later said that “this probably saved my life, because my parents had the wit to notice what was going on.” In 1933, when he was four, his parents left for France. After the German march into France, the family reached New York in 1941 by way of Spain and Portugal.

That childhood made language central to Oettinger’s mind. At 12, English became his third language. He graduated first in his class from the Bronx High School of Science and entered Harvard after MIT, his first choice, did not offer him a scholarship and Harvard did. He received his A.B. summa cum laude in 1951, studying Spanish and French literature, Russian, economics, and mathematics. As a junior he began working with Howard Aiken in Harvard’s Computation Laboratory, where he became interested in machine translation. After a year at Cambridge University on a Henry Fellowship, he completed a Harvard Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics in 1954 with a dissertation on “A study for the design of an automatic dictionary.”

Computing, language, and policy

Oettinger joined the Harvard faculty in 1955 and rose quickly, serving as instructor, assistant professor, associate professor, and then full professor in linguistics and applied mathematics. In 1960, at 31, he became the youngest tenured professor at Harvard in the modern era. His early work centered on machine translation, and he captured its difficulties with the example of syntactic ambiguity: “Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.” He also took part in the early development of computer code and artificial intelligence. In 1951 he developed the “response learning programme” and “shopping programme” for the University of Cambridge’s EDSAC computer. Influenced by Alan Turing’s views on machine learning, he believed the shopping program, which simulated a small child sent to a store, could pass a version of the Turing test.

Over time, Oettinger became best known for his work on information resources policy. In 1973, with John LeGates, he co-founded the Program on Information Resources Policy at Harvard University and served as its chairman until it ceased operations in 2011. The program worked on policy issues created by the meeting of telecommunications and digital computing. In the late 1970s, Oettinger coined the term “compunications” to describe the combination of computer and telecommunications technologies as digital technologies replaced analog forms, though he said the term was actually coined by his wife. He held the posts of Gordon McKay Professor of Applied Mathematics and Professor of Information Resources Policy at Harvard.

His public service was wide. He advised NASA’s Apollo Moon landing program from 1963 to 1967, served as president of the Association for Computing Machinery from 1966 to 1968, and founded the Computer Science and Engineering Board of the National Academy of Sciences, chairing it for six years beginning in 1967. He was appointed to the Massachusetts Cable Television Commission in 1972 and chaired it from 1975 to 1979. He also served as a consultant to the National Security Council from 1975 to 1981 and to the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board from 1981 to 1990.

Oettinger was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the IEEE, and the Association for Computing Machinery. President Gerald Ford commended him for his service as a consultant to the National Security Council. In recognition of his work in the intelligence community, the National Intelligence University named the Anthony G. Oettinger Science and Technology Intelligence School in his honor upon his retirement from its board. His words still matter because they joined technical precision to public purpose. He gave names and structure to changes that governments, universities, and citizens were only beginning to understand.