WARREN PLATH

1935 - 2021

PLATH--Warren Joseph. Warren Joseph Plath died peacefully at his Mount Kisco, NY home on February 14, 2021. The cause of death was congestive heart failure. Plath, 85, spent his entire career as an innovator in the field of theoretical and computational linguistics, conducting research at IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center until his retirement in 2001. Notably, he was the only sibling of the poet Sylvia Plath, a distinction he publicly shunned throughout his life, consistently turning away interviewers seeking to capitalize on his older sister's suicide. Plath was born in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts on April 27, 1935, to Otto Emil Plath and Aurelia Schober Plath. The family moved to Winthrop in the fall of 1936 to be closer to his maternal grandparents before settling in Wellesley in the fall of 1942. Beginning in 1949, Plath attended Phillips Exeter Academy on a full, four-year scholarship and graduated valedictorian of his class in 1953. His time at Exeter was formative, as were summers spent as a candy striper in a polio ward in Boston and in Austria as part of The Experiment in International Living. A joy in his life was seeing both of his daughters as well as his two eldest grandchildren also graduate from the Academy. After graduating summa cum laude from Harvard College in 1957, where he lettered in track and was a member of the Glee Club, Plath studied at the University of Bonn, Germany on a Fulbright fellowship. While working toward his Ph.D. at Harvard University in 1960, he attended a social mixer at which Margaret Dorothy Wetzel, impressed by his height (he was 6' 6" to her 5' 11") asked him to dance. The couple married in Rockville Center, Long Island in 1962. Plath received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1964. His dissertation, in the field of Mathematical Linguistics and Automatic Translation, was entitled "Multiple-Path Syntactic Analysis of Russian," a language he had not studied prior to embarking on that project. At IBM, Plath built one of the many foundations that underpin modern artificial intelligence and machine translation. In 1970 he was president of the Association for Computational Linguistics, an international scientific and professional society. He received the IBM Research Division's Outstanding Contribution Award in 1981, in recognition of his work on DTAF -- Document Translation Assistance Facility. He was a member of Sigma Xi, the scientific research honor society. Despite being a highly private person, Plath worked steadfastly to assist his mother, Aurelia Plath, in pursuing a project vitally important to her: compiling, editing, and publishing Letters Home, a collection of letters Sylvia Plath wrote to her family between her years at college and her death at age 30; the book was released in 1975. A year after his wife's death in 1992, Plath was introduced to Jennifer Reid Marcus, who would become his partner for the rest of his life. Marcus and Plath sang for many years with the Master Singers of Westchester and enjoyed traveling together to such places as the Sea of Cortez, Copper Canyon, the Galapagos, Kenya, and Tanzania. A loyal alumnus, Plath attended most, if not all, of his high school and college reunions and remained in lifelong contact with his roommates. The highlight of every year was, for him, spending summers on Cape Cod, as he had done since childhood, and watching his grandchildren grow up at his cottage in Eastham. His family and anyone who knew him well over the years will remember and miss his love of puns and word play, his brilliant mind, obsession with detail, enthusiasm for running and vegetable gardening, and lifelong fascination with the natural world. A passionate environmentalist, feminist, and anti-racist, Plath insisted on reading The New York Times from cover to cover each morning before starting his day and had a list of dozens of charitable organizations to which he contributed annually. He was proud to have achieved his goal of not dying while 45 was president. Indeed, he watched the second impeachment trial with intense interest and died the day after the vote in the U.S. Senate. Warren J. Plath was preceded in death by his parents, Otto Emil Plath and Aurelia Schober Plath; his sister, Sylvia Plath; and his wife of thirty years, Margaret Wetzel Plath. He is survived by his long-term partner, Jennifer Reid Marcus of Mount Kisco, NY; his two daughters, Jennifer Lynn Plath and husband Benjamin Boulton of Norwalk, CT, and Susan Plath Winston and husband Michael Winston of Norman, OK; and his four grandchildren, Margaret Evan Plath Kraus and Vivienne Charles Plath Kraus of Norwalk; Dorothy Plath Winston and Henry Plath Winston of Norman. The Plath family suggests that donations in Warren Plath's name be made to the Progressive Turnout Project or a local chapter of Planned Parenthood -- or to another progressive or local charity.