A less highlighted contribution of Turing is the Good-Turing estimator. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good%E2%80%93Turing_frequency_estimation http://en.wikipedi

A less highlighted contribution of Turing is the Good-Turing estimator. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good%E2%80%93Turing_frequency_estimation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good%E2%80%93Turing_frequency_e... It is used for predicting the probability of occurrence of objects belonging to a set of unknown cardinality. For example to answer questions like how many words did Shakespeare actually know. It finds heavy use in statistical NLP. http://nltk.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/doc/api/nltk.probability.GoodTuringProbDist-class.html http://nltk.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/doc/api/nltk.probabilit... A trivia that I find interesting as an Indian is that his parents came from a background in the executive branch of the Indian government.