Gregory Bateson

English anthropologist, cyberneticist, and the most important bridge in this corpus. Son of the geneticist who coined the word "genetics"; husband, for a time, of Margaret Mead; a fixture of the Macy Conferences; and later the presiding intelligence at Palo Alto, where the young Bandler and Grinder found him as a neighbour and colleague.

He is the hinge. Without Bateson, Korzybski stays a linguistic philosopher and NLP never happens: it was Bateson who introduced Grinder and Bandler to Milton Erickson, and Bateson's theory of levels that gave them the idea that communication has a structure you can model.