
Dr. Benjamin Wilson was invited to give a talk at Roanoke College, Salem, Virginia, as a speaker in their Department of Mathematics, Computer Science and Physics Conversation Series. His talk titled “Would Wheel of Fortune be Easier in Dothraki or Klingon?” was based on his research project with Stevenson Applied Math majors Gerald Roman-Gonzalez and Billy Heidel in which they are analyzing the complexity of constructed languages using tools from Information Theory, Dynamical Systems, and Statistics. During the talk, Dr. Wilson put attendees in the role of Claude Shannon in the late 1940’s who studied the complexity of written English using several experiments on native English speakers which exploited their inherent knowledge of the statistics of the language.