The author recalls her youth in Wroclaw where Jerzy Woronczak — a philologist and one of the pioneers in applying mathematical linguistics to literary analysis — worked. Woronczak was a true master for his students in the nineteen-seventies and eighties. It is interesting to trace the paradoxical journey from traditional Polish philology to mathematical linguistics, semiotics and structuralism fifty years ago, and from them to the new philology as a phenomenon of digital humanities.