Paul Thompson ( sinologist ) Paul Mulligan Thompson ( 10 February 1931 – 12 June 2007 ) was a British sinologist and pioneer in the field of Chinese computer applications . Biography . Paul Thompson was born at Xingtai in Hebei province , China , where his Northern Irish parents worked as missionaries with the China Inland Mission . He attended the Chefoo School , a Christian boarding school at Yantai in Shandong province , until November 1942 when the staff and students were interned at the Temple Hill Japanese Internment Camp . A few months later , in the summer of 1943 , Thompson and his family were moved to the Weixian Internment Camp in Shandong ( modern Weifang city ) , where they remained until liberated by American paratroopers in 1945 . His family then moved back to Northern Ireland , and Thompson completed his schooling in Belfast . After leaving school he travelled widely , and studied at the Free University of Amsterdam , the University of Minnesota at Minneapolis ( where he married his wife , Marcia Cole , in 1952 ) , and the U . S . Army Language School at Monterey , California , but he did not obtain a degree from any of these institutions . He also worked for several years as an interpreter in Japan and a teacher in Taiwan . In 1959 he was accepted into the University of Washington at Seattle , where he obtained a BA in 1960 , and studied for his PhD on the lost book of Shenzi under Hellmut Wilhelm . After receiving his PhD he taught at the University of Wisconsin from 1963 to 1970 , and then in 1970 he was appointed to a position at the School of Oriental and African Studies ( SOAS ) in London , where he remained until his retirement in 1996 . He was a key figure , together with D . C . Lau , Angus Graham and Sarah Allan , in making SOAS a world - renowned centre for the teaching of Chinese philosophy during the 1970s and 1980s . Thompson ' s major academic achievement was " The Shen Tzu Fragments " ( 1979 ) , a work of textual scholarship in which he constructed a critical edition of the lost book of Shen Dao ( probably originally composed during the early 3rd century BC ) from the hundreds of quotations from it that are preserved in other Chinese texts . The methodology that he devised for analyzing the Shenzi fragments was based on the methods originally developed in Classical and Biblical scholarship , and was the first time that such methods had been applied to a classical Chinese text . In addition to his work on early Chinese philosophy , Thompson was interested in the use of computers for sinological research , and in the early 1980s developed a Chinese text input system that used dynamic tables of statistical frequency to generate a list of candidate characters , thus laying the groundwork for the development of the most common Chinese language input systems in use today . He died of cancer in 2007 . After his death , Thompson ' s family presented his library to the Centre for Excavated Texts and Ancient Literature , Fudan University , Shanghai . In 2009 a conference was held in his memory at Fudan University , and the proceedings of the conference were published in 2010 as 出土文献与传世典籍的诠释 — 纪念谭朴森先生逝世两周年国际学术研讨会论文集 ( Excavated texts and transmitted literature : a festschrift for Paul Thompson ) by Shanghai guji chubanshe ( ISBN 7532556662 / 9787532556663 ) .