Fred and Damaris Parker-Rhodes were Cambridge Quakers and Damaris was a political activist. Fred was a long-term member of the Language Research Unit and contributed fundamentally to Bastin’s view of quantum physics, via what he called “the combinatorial hierarchy”, as well as to the Unit’s theories of language, particularly the use of formal models of the thesaurus as semantic representations based on lattice theory. He also created, with Roger Needham, the “Theory of Clumps”: a classification algorithm that influenced moden information retrieval and machine learning. He new more than 15 languages and was originally a biological statistician.

Frederick Parker-Rhodes’ Wikipedia page

Intersections poem by Fred Parker-Rhodes

Books/Reports/Blogs

• Parker-Rhodes, F. (1978). Wholesight: The Spirit Quest (PDF). Wallingford, Pennsylvania: Pendle Hill Publications. Retrieved 21 January 2011.
• The Theory of Indistinguishables: A Search for Explanatory Principles below the level of Physics, Springer (1981) 
• Needham R, Parker-Rhodes AF. (1960). “The theory of clumps”. Cambridge Language Research Unit, Report (126).
• Inferential Semantics, Humanities Press (1978) 
•  H. Pierre Noyes, The Inevitable Universe – Parker-Rhodes’ peculiar mixture of ontology and physics http://www.slac.stanford.edu/cgi-wrap/getdoc/slac-pub-5161.pdf (accessed 21 January 2011)
•  A.F. Parker-Rhodes, The Myth of the Rock http://ia700202.us.archive.org/22/items/TheMythOfTheRock_70/TheMythOfTheRock.pdf (accessed 21 January 2011)
• A.F. Parker-Rhodes, Children’s Stories http://frederickp-r.blogspot.com/(accessed 21 January 2011)
• “The wheel of Creation” – found in Catalogue of the Library of the Society of Friends. The catalogue also lists a number of contributions by Frederick Parker-Rhodes to The Friends Quarterly.

Memoir of Fred Parker-Rhodes by Yorick Wilks