Dear Friends and Colleagues,
It is with deep sorrow that I have to inform you that one of the figures who transformed contemporary semiotics, Jesper Hoffmeyer, passed away on 25 September 2019 at age 77.
Hoffmeyer was a professor at the University of Copenhagen’s Institute for Biological Chemistry, a leading figure in Biosemiotics, the President of the International Society for Biosemiotics Studies (ISBS), and from 2005 to 2010, co-editor of the journal Biosemiotics and the Springer Book series in Biosemiotics. Among his notable publications are Biosemiotics: An Examination into the Signs of Life and the Life of Signs and Signs of Meaning in the Universe. He also edited A Legacy for Living Systems: Gregory Bateson as Precursor to Biosemiotics.
Hoffmeyer was the Fourth Thomas Sebeok Fellow of the 25th Semiotic Society of America Annual Conference in 2000.
I had the honor of meeting Jasper Hoffmeyer at the Zoosemiotics Conference in Tartu, Estonia in 2011.
Farouk Y. Seif