David Rumelhart

David Everett Rumelhart (June 12, 1942 – March 13, 2011)

Rumelhart was born in Mitchell, South Dakota on June 12, 1942. His parents were Everett Leroy and Thelma Theora (Ballard) Rumelhart.^[2] He began his college education at the University of South Dakota, receiving a B.A. in psychology and mathematics in 1963. He studied mathematical psychology at Stanford University, receiving his Ph.D. in 1967.

Career

From 1967 to 1987 he served on the faculty of the Department of Psychology at the University of California, San Diego. In 1987 he moved to Stanford University, serving as Professor there until 1998.

Rumelhart was elected to the

In the same year, Rumelhart also published Parallel Distributed Processing: Explorations in the Microstructure of Cognition[6] with James McClelland, which described their creation of computer simulations of perceptrons, giving to computer scientists their first testable models of neural processing, and which is now regarded as a central text in the field of cognitive science.^[1]

His 1986 work with McClelland ignited the "past tense debate" during the 1980s revival of neural networks.^[7] The connectionism side debated the symbolic side, represented by Jerry Fodor, Gary Marcus, Zenon Pylyshyn, Steven Pinker, etc. The debate concerned whether neural networks or symbolic programs were adequate models for how English speakers can turn a verb into its past tense.^[8][9]

Rumelhart's models of

In his honor, in 2000 the Robert J. Glushko and Pamela Samuelson Foundation created the David E. Rumelhart Prize for Contributions to the Theoretical Foundations of Human Cognition.^[1][10] A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Rumelhart as the 88th most cited psychologist of the 20th century, tied with John Garcia, James J. Gibson, Louis Leon Thurstone, Margaret Floy Washburn, and Robert S. Woodworth.^[11]

References