b. 1936
E. Mark Gold is an American mathematician and computer scientist best known for his foundational work in computational learning theory. His 1967 paper on language identification in the limit established key formal results that continue to influence philosophy of language, linguistics, and machine learning.
Formulated the theory of language identification in the limit (1967)
Proved foundational impossibility results for learning formal languages from positive examples
Influenced debates in philosophy of language and linguistic nativism
Contributed to the mathematical foundations of inductive inference