Frederick Parker-Rhodes

Arthur Frederick Parker-Rhodes (21 November 1914 – 2 March 1987) was an English linguist, plant pathologist, computer scientist, mathematician, mystic, and mycologist, who also introduced original theories in physics.

Background & education Arthur Frederick Parker-Rhodes was born in Newington, Yorkshire on 21 November 1914. He was educated at Marlborough College and Magdalene College, Cambridge, from where he graduated in 1934 and subsequently received his PhD. Being of independent means, he was able to pursue a variety of interests. joined the Society of Friends. They had three boys (one of whom died aged 12) and a daughter, Oriole.

Plant pathology and mycology During the Second World War, Parker-Rhodes worked as a plant pathologist at Long Ashton Research Station from where he published a series of research papers on the mechanism of fungicidal actions. His personal interest, however, was in the larger fungi, particularly agarics (mushrooms and toadstools), and he was a familiar figure at forays of the British Mycological Society in the 1940s and 1950s. He even published a statistical survey of these forays. For nearly 30 years Parker-Rhodes tutored a course on fungi at the Flatford Mill Field Studies Centre in Suffolk and, in 1950, published a popular book, Fungi, friends and foes. Subsequently, he produced papers studying the kinetics of fairy rings and a series surveying the larger fungi of Skokholm, an island off the western coast of Wales. The work analyzes sentences and longer passages into mathematical lattices (the kind in Lattice Theory, not crystal lattices) which are semantic networks. These are inferred not only from sentence syntax but also from grammatical focus and sometimes prosody. Each node the network is a concept in one or more structured conceptual dimensions (called base domains, which are also lattice structures); this places a description into a resulting abstract lattice of possible descriptions, ordered from general to specific. This structure can be used for automated inference in artificial intelligence and machine translation. He factors some of the dimensions (base domains, like a quantifier lattice, a (deep) case lattice, et al.) into sublattice-factors. Division of the lattice of possible descriptions into factors acts to divide-and-conquer the abstract lattice of all possible descriptions into simpler, independent semantic "factors" or "dimensions".

His Times obituarist, Ted Bastin, says of Parker-Rhodes' personality and scientific contribution: "One must say, in sum, that Parker-Rhodes leaves us with an enigma – a situation to which he brought his characteristic gentle and slightly amused acquiescence.". relating to the Combinatorial Hierarchy's remarkable correspondences to the dimensionless scaling laws of physics. His pamphlet, Wholesight: The Spirit Quest (1978), that explored mythical tales and parables in an attempt to bring science and religion together. He wrote a Key to the British basidiomycetes which is held by the library at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

Selected scientific publications Parker-Rhodes, A.F. (1949). "The Basidiomycetes of Skokholm Island. II. Genetical implications of spores measurement in two agarics". New Phytologist 48 (2): 382–389. ________________. (1950). Fungi-friends and Foes. 140 pp. UK, London. with photographs by Peter Martin Brabazon Walker ________________. (1950). "The Basidiomycetes of Skokholm Island. III. Genetic isolation in Panaeolus papilionaceous". New Phytologist 49: 328–334. ________________. (1950). "The Basidiomycetes of Skokholm Island. IV. A case of hybridization in Psilocybe (Deconica)". New Phytologist 49 (3): 335–343. ________________. (1951). "The Basidiomycetes of Skokholm Island. V. An elementary theory of anemophilous dissemination". New Phytologist 50 (1): 84–97. ________________. (1951). "The Basidiomycetes of Skokholm Island. VII. Some floristic and ecological calculations". New Phytologist 50 (2): 227–243. ________________. (1951). "The Basidiomycetes of Skokholm Island. VI. Observations on certain uncommon species and varieties". Transactions of the British Mycological Society 34 (3): 360–367. ________________. (1952). "The Basidiomycetes of Skokholm Island. VIII. Taxonomic distributions". (PDF) New Phytologist 51 (2): 216–228. ________________. (1953). "The Basidiomycetes of Skokholm Island. IX. Response to meteorological conditions". New Phytologist 52 (1): 14–21. ________________. (1953). "The Basidiomycetes of Thetford Chase. I. Correlation with age of plantation". New Phytologist 52 (1): 65–70. ________________. (1953). "The Basidiomycetes of Skokholm Island. X. Population densities". (PDF) New Phytologist 52 (3): 273–291. ________________. (1954). "The Basidiomycetes of Skokholm Island. XI. Intramycelial variation in Hygrocybe turunda var. lepida". (PDF) New Phytologist 53 (1): 92–98. ________________. (1954). "Deme structure in higher fungi: Mycena galopus". Transactions of the British Mycological Society 37 (3): 314–320. ________________. (1954). "The Basidiomycetes of Skokholm Island. I. Annotated species list". Transactions of the British Mycological Society 37 (4): 324–342. ________________. (1955). "The Basidiomycetes of Skokholm Island. XII. Correlation with the chief plant associations". New Phytologist 54 (2): 259–276. ________________. (1955). "Some typical communities of Basidiomycetes". Transactions of the British Mycological Society 38 (2): 173. ________________. (1955). "Statistical aspects of fungus forays". Transactions of the British Mycological Society 38 (3): 283–290. ________________. (1955). "The Basidiomycetes of Skokholm Island". XIII. Echinotrema clanculare gen. et sp. nov." Transactions of the British Mycological Society 38 (4): 366–368. ________________. (1956). "Distribution of fungi in a small wood". (PDF) Annals of Botany London, N.S. 20 (78): 251–264. ________________. (1979). Handbook with Keys for the Identification of the Tachycarpic Hymenomycetidae, Namely All the Toadstools Hitherto Found in the British Isles. 234 pp. UK; A.F. Parker-Rhodes.