Thomas Albert Sebeok (, ; November 9, 1920December 21, 2001) was a Hungarian-born American polymath, semiotician, and linguist. As one of the founders of the biosemiotics field, he studied non-human and cross-species signaling and communication. He is also known for his work in the development of long-time nuclear waste warning messages, in which he worked with the Human Interference Task Force (established 1981) to create methods for keeping the inhabitants of Earth away from buried nuclear waste that will still be hazardous 10,000 or more years in the future. Early life and education Thomas Sebeok was born on November 9, 1920, in Budapest, Hungary. He attended secondary school at the famous Budapest-Fasori Evangélikus Gimnázium, which educated notables such as Edward Teller, John von Neumann, and Eugene Wigner. After a brief stint at Cambridge University (Magdalene College) in England, he moved to the United States at the age of 17 and became a naturalized citizen in 1944. Sebeok earned a bachelor's degree in 1941 at the University of Chicago. He earned a master's degree in anthropological linguistics, under the external guidance of Roman Jakobson, at Princeton University in 1943 and, in 1945, a doctorate at Princeton University; his dissertation was titled Finnish and Hungarian case systems: their form and function. Academic work In 1943, Sebeok started work at Indiana University in Bloomington, assisting the Amerindianist Carl Voegelin in managing the country's largest Army Specialized Training Program in foreign languages. He then created the university's department of Uralic and Altaic Studies, covering the languages of Eastern Europe, Russia and Asia. He was also the chair of the university's Research Center for Language and Semiotic Studies. As a professor at Indiana University, Sebeok studied both human and non-human systems of signaling and communication, as well as the philosophy of mind. He was among the founders of biosemiotics, and coined the term "zoosemiotics" in 1963 to describe the development of signals and signs by non-human animal species. He also continued his work as a linguist, publishing several articles and books analyzing aspects of the Mari language (referring to it by the name "Cheremis"). His transdisciplinary work and professional collaborations spanned the fields of anthropology, biology, folklore studies, linguistics, psychology, and semiotics. Sebeok was the editor-in-chief of the journal Semiotica, the leading periodical in the field, from its establishing in 1969 until 2001. He was also the editor of several book series and encyclopedias, including