Jonathan Pool

Pool worked at the universities of Chicago, New York (Stony Brook), Washington (Seattle), Stanford as well as in Mannheim, Paderborn, and Bielefeld in Germany.

Pool has always been impressed by the degree to which peoples' first language and linguistic knowledge influence their lives.

While teaching English in Turkey he was surprised to find how many people got their jobs on the basis of their knowledge of languages rather than of their professional skills.

This influenced the choice of his research field; in 1981 he published a paper on the measurement of the consequences of linguistic discrimination.

[1] At that time he met Reinhard Selten, with whom he worked on the application of game theory on problems of linguistic diversity.