Leslie Steiner was born in Cuba in 1949. Her mother was a black American from Alabama; her father was an Austrian Jew. From 1951 on, Steiner grew up in Ann Arbor, where both her parents taught at the University of Michigan, and where Steiner now holds joint tenure in the German, Comparative Literature, and Mathematics departments. Steiner’s mathematical work has mostly been done by an obscure spin-off of a branch of category theory called ‘naming, listing, and counting theory.’ By the time she was twenty-two, her work had established her as one of America’s three leading experts in the field. This was the work that she was shortly to bring to bear on the problem of this ancient text in such a novel and ingenious way. When she was twenty-four, Steiner published a book called The Edge of Language with Bowling Green University Press – not, as one might imagine from our account so far, a treatise on ancient scripts, but rather a study of linguistic patterns common to comic books, pornography, contemporary poetry, and science fiction,* one of the decade’s more daunting volumes in the field of popular and cross-cultural studies.
