Jean Paul Frédéric Serra is a French mathematician and engineer, known as one of the co-founders of mathematical morphology. Serra received a scientific baccalauréat in 1957, an engineering degree from the École Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Nancy in 1962, he obtained a Bachelor degree in philosophy/psychology, from the University of Nancy, in 1965. He obtained a PhD in Mathematical Geology from the University of Nancy in 1967, a doctorat d'etat in Mathematics, from the Pierre and Marie Curie University, Paris, in 1986, he speaks French, Russian and Spanish. From 1962 to 1966, while a research engineer at the Institut de recherche de la sidérurgie, Serra was a PhD student under the supervision of Georges Matheron; the subject of his thesis was "stochastic modeling of the iron deposit of Lorraine, at various scales," one of the goals of, to quantify petrographic characteristics of its iron orebody. During that period, Serra came up with the idea of using structuring elements for transforming images of cross sections of the ore, in order to gain information about it.

The result was a device called "Texture Analyser", patented in 1965. This work lead to the concept of hit-or-miss transform, which evolved into the concepts of erosion, dilation and closing due to Matheron. Granulometry and other concepts followed. In the Winter of 1966, in a pub of Nancy, Philippe Formery, Serra decided to give a name to this body of works: "Mathematical morphology"; the new theory and method has since evolved to be applied in a variety of image processing problems and tasks, is researched worldwide. In 1968, the Centre of Mathematical Morphology of the École des Mines de Paris was created. Matheron was named director, Serra was hired as master of research and assistant director. In 1986, upon the split of the Centre of Geostatistics and Mathematical Morphology into two separate centers, Serra became director of research and the director of the new CMM. Serra has continued to contribute to mathematical morphology over the years. 1983–: Member of the editorial board of Acta Stereologica.

1988–1991: Member of the scientific board of the French T. V. cultural program. 1989–: Member of the editorial board of the Journal of Visual Communication and Image Representation. 1990–: Member of the editorial board of the Journal of Mathematical Imaging and Vision. 1991–1993: Chairman of the "Image Algebra and Morphological Processing Conference" in SPIE annual meeting, San Diego, California, USA. 1993: Chairman of the first Int. Conf. in Mathematical Morphology, Spain. 1994: Chairman of the second Int. Conf. in Mathematical Morphology, France. 1982: ESCLANGON prize, awarded by the French Society of Physics. 1988: First award of the great prize of the AFCET Society. 1989: Chevalier of the National Order of Merit. 1993: Doctor Honoris Causa of the Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain. 1993: Founder of the International Society for Mathematical Morphology, first president of this society. 2006: First recipient of Georges Matheron Lectureship Award of International Association for Mathematical Geosciences Image Analysis and Mathematical Morphology, ISBN 0-12-637240-3 Image Analysis and Mathematical Morphology, Volume 2: Theoretical Advances, ISBN 0-12-637241-1 Serra's curriculum vitae Serra's web page at the Centre de Morphologie Mathématique, École des Mines de Paris History of Mathematical Morphology, by Georges Matheron and Jean Serra Mathematical Morphology and its Application to Signal Processing, J. Serra and Ph. Salembier, proceedings of the 1st international symposium on mathematical morphology, ISBN 84-7653-271-7 Mathematical Morphology and Its Applications to Image Processing, J. Serra and P. Soille, proceedings of the 2nd international symposium on mathematical morphology, ISBN 0-7923-3093-5 Mathematical Morphology: 40 Years On, Christian Ronse, Laurent Najman, Etienne Decencière, ISBN 1-4020-3442-3 Mathematical Morphology and its Applications to Signal and Image Processing, Gerald J.

F. Banon, Junior Barrera, Ulisses M. Braga-Neto, proceedings of the 8th international symposium on mathematical morphology, ISBN 978-85-17-00032-4 Special Issue on'Spatial Information Retrieval, Analysis and Modelling, B. S. Daya Sagar and Jean Serra, International Journal of Remote Sensing, v. 31, no. 22, p. 5747-6032 Special Issue on'Filtering and Segmentation in Mathematical Morphology, Laurent Najman, Junior Barrera, B. S. Daya Sagar, Petros Maragos and Dan Schonfeld, IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing, v. 6, no. 7, p. 737-886

Nostratic is a hypothetical and controversial macrofamily, which includes many of the indigenous language families of Eurasia, although its exact composition and structure vary among proponents. It comprises Kartvelian, Indo-European, Uralic languages; the hypothetical ancestral language of the Nostratic family is called Proto-Nostratic. Proto-Nostratic would have been spoken between 15,000 and 12,000 BCE, in the Epipaleolithic period, close to the end of the last glacial period; the Nostratic hypothesis originates with Holger Pedersen in the early 20th century. The name "Nostratic" is due to Pedersen, derived from the Latin nostrates "fellow countrymen"; the hypothesis was expanded in the 1960s by Soviet linguists, notably Vladislav Illich-Svitych and Aharon Dolgopolsky, termed the "Moscovite school" by Allan Bomhard, it has received renewed attention in English-speaking academia since the 1990s. The hypothesis is controversial and has varying degrees of acceptance amongst linguists worldwide with most rejecting Nostratic and other macrofamily hypotheses.

In Russia, it is endorsed by a minority of linguists, such as Vladimir Dybo, but is not a accepted hypothesis. Allan Bomhard is Lyle Campbell a critic; some linguists take an agnostic view. Eurasiatic, a similar grouping, was proposed by Joseph Greenberg and endorsed by Merritt Ruhlen: it is taken as a subfamily of Nostratic by Bomhard; the last quarter of the 19th century saw various linguists putting forward proposals linking the Indo-European languages to other language families, such as Finno-Ugric and Altaic. These proposals were taken much further in 1903 when Holger Pedersen proposed "Nostratic", a common ancestor for the Indo-European, Finno-Ugric, Turkish, Manchu, Eskimo and Hamitic languages, with the door left open to the eventual inclusion of others; the name Nostratic derives from the Latin word nostrās, meaning'our fellow-countryman' and has been defined, since Pedersen, as consisting of those language families that are related to Indo-European. Merritt Ruhlen notes that this definition is not properly taxonomic but amorphous, since there are broader and narrower degrees of relatedness, moreover, some linguists who broadly accept the concept have criticised the name as reflecting the ethnocentrism frequent among Europeans at the time.

Martin Bernal has described the term as distasteful because it implies that speakers of other language families are excluded from academic discussion. So, the concept arguably transcends ethnocentric associations. Proposed alternative names such as Mitian, formed from the characteristic Nostratic first- and second-person pronouns mi'I' and ti'you', have not attained the same currency. An early supporter was the French linguist Albert Cuny—better known for his role in the development of the laryngeal theory—who published his Recherches sur le vocalisme, le consonantisme et la formation des racines en « nostratique », ancêtre de l'indo-européen et du chamito-sémitique in 1943. Although Cuny enjoyed a high reputation as a linguist, the work was coldly received. While Pedersen's Nostratic hypothesis did not make much headway in the West, it became quite popular in what was the Soviet Union. Working independently at first, Vladislav Illich-Svitych and Aharon Dolgopolsky elaborated the first version of the contemporary form of the hypothesis during the 1960s.

They expanded it to include additional language families. Illich-Svitych prepared the first dictionary of the hypothetical language. A principal source for the items in Illich-Svitych's dictionary was the earlier work of Alfredo Trombetti, an Italian linguist who had developed a classification scheme for all the world's languages reviled at the time and subsequently ignored by all linguists. In Trombetti's time, a held view on classifying languages was that similarity in inflections is the surest proof of genetic relationship. In the interim, the view had taken hold that the comparative method—previously used as a means of studying languages known to be related and without any thought of classification—is the most effective means to establish genetic relationship hardening into the conviction that it is the only legitimate means to do so; this view was basic to the outlook of the new Nostraticists. Although Illich-Svitych adopted many of Trombetti's etymologies, he sought to validate them by a systematic comparison of the sound systems of the languages concerned.

The chief events in Nostratic studies in 2008 were the posting online of the latest version of Dolgopolsky's Nostratic Dictionary and the publication of Allan Bomhard's comprehensive treatment of the subject, Reconstructing Proto-Nostratic, in 2 volumes. 2008 saw the opening of a website, devoted to providing important texts in Nostratic studies online, now offline. Significant was Bomhard's critical review of Dolgopolsky's dictionary, in which he argued that onl