Vittrow’s scheme never came to fruition, but for about 150 years it was the best idea around. It wasn’t until 1960 that another proposal for ET communication came along, one that continues to shape the exolinguistic field that it founded. The proposal took the form of a book titled Lincos: Design of a Language for Cosmic Intercourse, and its publication marked the first artificial language constructed for the sole purpose of communicating with extraterrestrial life.

Lincos, a portmanteau of lingua cosmica, was the brainchild of the German mathematician Hans Freudenthal. Born in 1905, Freudenthal began his academic career as a lecturer at the University of Amsterdam in 1930, a position he held until the Nazi invasion of the Netherlands in 1940. After losing his job, Freudenthal kept a low profile for several years of the occupation. He was sent to the labor camp Havelte in 1944, but managed to escape a few months later to Amsterdam, where he would watch the Allied liberation in May of 1945. Shortly thereafter, Freudenthal was offered a full professorship in geometry at the University of Utrecht.

A fierce proponent of educational reform in the post-war years, Freudenthal vehemently opposed the introduction of “New Math,” a rigorously logic-based teaching methodology, into the Dutch curriculum. Freudenthal favored pedagogical methods that connected mathematic principles with daily life, something at which New Math failed dismally. It was the combination of these two interests—logic and applied math—which would ultimately provide Freudenthal with the intellectual fodder necessary to create Lincos, a language that used math to communicate both universal truths and the particulars of daily life on Earth.

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Despite its status as a milestone for the SETI community, Lincos never really garnered much attention from the general public. This is probably because the text is mostly comprised of dense, technical jargon and mathematical formulas that are all but unintelligible to the lay reader.

“It’s a groundbreaking work,” said Yvan Dutil, an astrophysicist with the University of Québec’s Télé-université, “but Freudenthal’s book is the most boring I have ever read. Logarithm tables are cool compared to it.”

In the introduction to Lincos, Freudenthal announced that his primary purpose “is to design a language that can be understood by a person not acquainted with any of our natural languages, or even their syntactic structures … The messages communicated by means of this language [containing] not only mathematics, but in principle the whole bulk of our knowledge.”

To this end, Freudenthal developed Lincos as a spoken language, rather than a written one—it’s made up of phonemes, not letters, and governed by phonetics, not spelling. The speech is itself made up of unmodulated radio waves of varying length and duration, encoded with a hodgepodge of symbols borrowed from mathematics, science, symbolic logic, and Latin. In their various combinations, these waves can be used to communicate anything from basic mathematical equations to explanations for abstract concepts like death and love.