My ways to the studies of language were rather indirect. After having graduated in physics (1957) I read John von Neumann and Morgenstern’s Theory of Games and was fascinated by their exemplification of the modern axiomatic method. I asked myself the burning question how far mathematical theories and formalization could lead in disciplines that develop beyond the natural sciences. The question led me to studies of the humanities. I first concentrated on the philosophy of Leibniz’ de Arte Combinatoria and his Characteristica universalis and wrote my first dissertation thesis about Symbolic Representations used in modern science exemplifying, among other systems, networks of automata systems and the notations in Frege’s Conceptual Notation for Logic. Subsequently I studied Neo-Humboldtian linguistics and wrote my second thesis about its possible formalization in terms of information flow networks.

An interesting research position about theoretical and computational linguistics and their possible applications to machine translation led me to many cooperation visits to research institutes in Europe, the United States and Israel, and participation at the 1964 International Colloquium for Algebraic Linguistics and Automata Theory about linguistic models in Jerusalem. During my years in Berlin I formally compared the theoretical varieties of Generative Grammar with the more mathematical models of Montague Grammar. Changing from Berlin to the new University in Bochum initiated a new start, caused by organizing a colloquium in honour of the famous linguist R. Jakobson at the occasion of his honorary doctorate. Since Jakobson knew that our group had already studied the clear introduction and detailed descriptions to functional brain architecture in Popper-Eccles’ book The Self and its Brain he proposed the colloquium title: Language and Brain, hoping that we thus joined the new orientation he had described in a well-known New York University lecture.