Ferdinand de Saussure died on February 22, 1913, at age 55. He was a Swiss linguist and semiotician who is widely recognized as one of the founders of modern linguistics and semiotics. His contributions to the fields include groundbreaking work in the development of the structuralist approach to language analysis and the notion of the linguistic sign as the basic unit of language. He developed the theory of the arbitrariness of the sign and the distinction between langue (systematic rules) and parole (actual utterances). In addition to his might work in linguistics and semiotics, he was also well-known for his work on Indo-European languages. He wrote several books, including Cours de linguistique générale, which was published posthumously. He left a lasting impression on the fields of linguistics and semiotics, and his theories remain widely accepted in the academic world.