At the Rockefeller Foundation, he was responsible for approving grants for major projects in molecular engineering and genetics, in agriculture (particularly for developing new strains of wheat and rice), and in medical research.

He also authored the books Lady Luck: The Theory of Probability, first published in 1963 and republished in 1982, Elementary Mathematical Analysis, and an autobiography called Scene of Change.

I will now proceed to decode.Weaver had first mentioned the possibility of using digital computers to translate documents between natural human languages in March 1947 in a letter to the cyberneticist Norbert Wiener.

[8] Said to be probably the single most influential publication in the early days of machine translation, it formulated goals and methods before most people had any idea of what computers might be capable of, and was the direct stimulus for the beginnings of research first in the United States and then later, indirectly, throughout the world.

The impact of Weaver's memorandum is attributable not only to his widely recognized expertise in mathematics and computing, but also, and perhaps even more, to the influence he enjoyed with major policy-makers in U.S. government agencies.

Finally, the fourth proposal was that there may also be linguistic universals underlying all human languages which could be exploited to make the problem of translation more straightforward.

Weaver argued for this position using a metaphor: "Think, by analogy, of individuals living in a series of tall closed towers, all erected over a common foundation.

He was inspired by Erwin Reifler,[10] who in 1948 presented a paper entitled "the Chinese Language in the Light of Comparative Semantics" at the American Philosophical Society annual conference.

His suggestion for eliminating the problem was implementing a human pre-editor with the knowledge of the output language, who would add additional symbols for grammatical, lexical and logical correctness.

The post editor, in turn, would have the task of rendering the text generated by MT reasonable and logical; ideally, he would have the knowledge of the source language.

[13] Among other features, it provides excerpts from the business correspondence of the author, Lewis Carroll (the Reverend Charles Dodgson), dealing with publishing royalties and permissions as Alice's fame snowballed worldwide.

Ever the scientist, even in the area of literature, Weaver devised a design for evaluating the quality of the various translations, focusing on the nonsense, puns and logical jokes in the Mad Tea-Party scene.

His range of contacts provided an impressive if eccentric list of collaborators in the evaluation exercise, including anthropologist Margaret Mead (for the South Pacific Pidgin translation), longtime Jerusalem mayor Teddy Kollek, and Nobel laureate biochemist Hugo Theorell (Swedish).