Science & invention
Walter Pitts
1923–1969 · logician, computational neuroscientist
Self-taught Detroit-born logician who, with Warren McCulloch, wrote the 1943 paper that introduced the first mathematical model of a neural network.
- Born
Detroit, Michigan- Died
Cambridge, Massachusetts
aged 46- Birth name
- Walter Harry Pitts Jr.
- Detroit years
- 1923–1938
- Field
- Science & invention
01 / The Detroit story
The Detroit story
Pitts was born in Detroit in 1923 and grew up in a hard home, finding refuge in books and teaching himself logic, mathematics and languages. Friends later told the story that at twelve he spent three days in a library reading Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead's Principia Mathematica and wrote to Russell pointing out problems in it. At fifteen he left home for Chicago, where he attended Russell's lectures and fell in with the neurophysiologist Warren McCulloch, who took him and Jerome Lettvin into his household. Their 1943 paper 'A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity' described the brain as a network of simple on-off units; the McCulloch–Pitts neuron remains the starting point of artificial neural networks. Pitts went on to work with Norbert Wiener at MIT and co-wrote 'What the Frog's Eye Tells the Frog's Brain' (1959), but he never took a degree and died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1969.
Highlights
- Co-author of 'A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity' (1943)
- The McCulloch–Pitts neuron, the first formal model of a nerve cell
- Co-author of 'What the Frog's Eye Tells the Frog's Brain' (1959)
- Born in Detroit, 1923; left home at fifteen