> Kolmogorov armed a group of researchers with electromechanical calculators and charged them with the task of calculating the rhythmical structures of Russian poetry

And this is what "big data" and NLP were like before computers :).

One can only imagine what he could have done with a modern computer. (Which is particular hard to imagine because he's responsible for advances which ultimately led to these same modern computers...)

Also, as an aside, I'm very impressed by the quality of nautil.us articles. I've come a across a few randomly, and they've been uniformly high in quality, interesting and insightful.

Moreover, unlike much popular science/math reporting, the articles are not ridden with obvious errors and yet are easily followed by somebody not in the field. An impressive combination. (Not surprising for this particular article, I suppose: it was written by a professor teaching the history of mathematics at MIT.)