Max Planck Institute for the History of Science

Malcolm Hyman

Research Scholar

Ph.D.

Residence: since October 1, 2004

Obituary

It is with great sadness that I have to announce our colleague Malcolm Hyman’s unexpected demise on Friday, September 4, 2009.

With Malcolm we lose a close friend and a great scholar. He was a historian of science, a linguist, a classicist, a Sanskrit scholar, an information scientist, all at once – a true Renaissance mind. For our department and for the institute as a whole he played a crucial role: he was a member of the Collaborative Research Centre 644 “Transformations of Antiquity”, he was a key figure in our project on the globalization of knowledge and its consequences, he initiated a workshop series on multilingualism and linguae francae, he successfully led a very productive group in the context of the Max Planck Digital Library, he organized one of the Cross-Sectional Groups of the TOPOI Excellence Cluster, and he was always there to give advice, to help out, to stimulate new ideas, or to clear the atmosphere with a subtle joke. He was a warm and gentle human being, a unique mind whose loss is irreparable. Malcolm leaves a wife, Ludmila, and their son of eight months Stanley. We are inconsolable.

Jürgen Renn

Selected publications

Hyman, Malcolm. "Semantic networks : a tool for investigating conceptual change and knowledge transfer in the history of science." In: Übersetzung und Transformation, eds.: Böhme, Hartmut; Rapp, Christof; Rösler, Wolfgang. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2007.

Hyman, Malcolm. "From Paninian sandhi to finite state calculus." In: Proceedings of the first international Sanskrit computational linguistics symposium , eds.: Huet, Gérard; Kulkarni, Amba. Rocquencourt, France: INRIA, 2007.

Hyman, Malcolm; Renn, Jürgen. "From research challenges of the humanities to the epistemic web (Web 3.0)." In: NSF/JISC Repositories Workshop, April 17 - 19, 2007, Phoenix, Arizona. 2007.

Hyman, Malcolm. "Of glyphs and glottography. " Language & Communication 26 (3/4 2006)

Hyman, Malcolm. "Terms for 'Word' in Roman grammar." In: Antike Fachtexte, eds.: Fögen, Thorsten. Berlin [u.a.]: de Gruyter, 2005.