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Page the rigorous methodology of structural linguistics" In April of 1960 he published his findings.
At first, Stokoe did not recognize the implications of his work. For him, it was an intellectual challenge, like the challenge of searching for the meaning of a single word in King Alfred's translation of Orosius. To solve that problem Stokoe had spent a summer examining charts, books, sailing directions, maps, and projections it was hard work, but there was pleasure in it.
Research was a habit, away of living, ingrained from childhood. His father "had always insisted that he learn to do things thoroughly, the way they should be done, whether the job was farmwork or classwork" Instead of maps and projections, Stokoe began to study "the phonological, morphological, and semiological organization of signs" This time the intellectual challenge had human ramifications his "brilliant deaf students were getting failing grades in
English," and he still didn't know what to do about it.6
Stokoe remembers the three years between the summer in Buffalo and the publication of his Sign Language Structure (and his lesser-known textbook The Calculus of Structure, devised to help his students learn English through mathematical principles) as "a time when I was full of ideas, much more yeasty and less articulated probably than I can make them sound now" During those years, he was looking at the connections between linguistics and mathematics. "What brings the two 1960 books together,"
Stokoe says, 'is the convergence in my mind of certain mathematical principles and the regularity found in languages. About the same time that I was seeing more and more regularity of a linguistic kind in my students' and deaf colleagues' signing, and getting George Detmold's approval to pursue research into the phenomenon, he was encouraging the math faculty to open the doors to the 'new math."7
Stokoe attended seminars and lectures on mathematical subjects. He readand became enamored withThe World of Mathematics:
A Small Library of the Literature of Mathematics, from A'hmose the Scribe to Albert Einstein.8 In 1959, with Detmold's encouragement, he attended a conference in Los Angeles sponsored jointly by linguists and mathematicians. There he heard a presentation by Noam Chomsky, whose 1957 pub-

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