Walter Pitts

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Walter Pitts
Logician
Walter Pitts (right) with Jerome Lettvin, co-author of the cognitive science paper "What the Frog's Eye Tells the Frog's Brain" (1959)

Walter Harry Pitts, Jr. (23 April 1923 – 14 May 1969) was an American

McCulloch–Pitts neuron. Prior to that paper, he formalized his ideas regarding the fundamental steps to building a Turing machine
in "The Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics" in an essay titled "Some observations on the simple neuron circuit".

Early life

Walter Pitts was born in

Cambridge University
at age 12. The offer was not taken up; however, Pitts did decide to become a logician. At age 15 he left home to study.

Academic career

Pitts probably continued to correspond with Bertrand Russell; and at the age of 15 he attended Russell's lectures at the

Warren McCulloch
, who would become a professor of psychiatry at Illinois.

In 1941

Associate of Arts (his only earned degree) for his work on the paper.[11]

In 1943, Lettvin introduced Pitts to Norbert Wiener at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Their first meeting, where they discussed Wiener's proof of the ergodic theorem, went so well that Pitts moved to Greater Boston to work with Wiener. While Pitts was an unofficial student under the aegis of Wiener at MIT until their acrimonious parting in 1952, he formally enrolled as a graduate student in the physics department during the 1943–1944 academic year and in the electrical engineering department from 1956–1958.[11][12]

In 1944, Pitts was hired by Kellex Corporation (later acquired in 1950 by Vitro Corporation) in New York City, part of the Atomic Energy Project.[13]

From 1946, Pitts was a core member of the Macy conferences, whose principal purpose was to set the foundations for a general science of the workings of the human mind.

Personal life, emotional trauma and decline

In 1951, Wiener convinced

Pat Wall. Pitts wrote a large dissertation on the properties of neural nets connected in three dimensions. Lettvin described him as "in no uncertain sense the genius of the group … when you asked him a question, you would get back a whole textbook."[14] Pitts never married.[1]
Pitts was also described as an eccentric, refusing to allow his name to be made publicly available. He continued to refuse all offers of advanced degrees or positions of authority at MIT, in part as he would have to sign his name.

In 1952, Wiener suddenly turned against McCulloch—his wife, Margaret Wiener, hated McCulloch[15]—and broke off relations with anyone connected to him, including Pitts.[15]

Although he remained employed as a

olfaction
in 1965.

Pitts died in 1969 of bleeding esophageal varices, a condition usually associated with cirrhosis and alcoholism.[1][2][15]

Publications

References

  1. ^ a b c d Smalheiser, Neil R. "Walter Pitts" Archived 2016-03-04 at the Wayback Machine, Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, Volume 43, Number 2, Winter 2000, pp. 217–226, The Johns Hopkins University Press
  2. ^ a b Cf. Anderson (1998) p.218 conversation with Michael A. Arbib
  3. ^ a b Cf. Conway, Flo; Siegelman, Jim (2005), p.138
  4. ^ Singer, Milton, "A Tale of Two Amateurs Who Crossed Cultural Frontiers with Boole's Symbolical Algebra", Semiotica. Volume 105, Issue 1-2, 1995. Cf. pp. 134–138[permanent dead link]
  5. Cognitive Science (Archived August 30, 2003, at the Wayback Machine
    )
  6. ^ Cf. Conway, Flo; Siegelman, Jim (2005), p.139
  7. ^ Cf. Aizawa & Schlatter
  8. ^ Cf. Anderson (1998) p.105 conversation with Jack D. Cowan
  9. ^ Cf. Aizawa 1992
  10. S2CID 8757655
    .
  11. ^
    ISBN 9780191003776
    – via Google Books.
  12. ^ Cf. Conway, Flo; Siegelman, Jim (2005), pp. 141–2
  13. ^ Cf. Anderson (1998) p.4 conversation with Jerome Y. Lettvin
  14. ISBN 978-0-262-01167-9
    .
  15. ^
    ISSN 2372-1758. Archived from the original
    on June 14, 2016. Retrieved 13 Jul 2016. There was just one person who wasn't happy about the reunion: Wiener's wife. Margaret Wiener was, by all accounts, a controlling, conservative prude—and she despised McCulloch's influence on her husband. McCulloch hosted wild get-togethers at his family farm in Old Lyme, Connecticut, where ideas roamed free and everyone went skinny-dipping. It had been one thing when McCulloch was in Chicago, but now he was coming to Cambridge and Margaret wouldn't have it. And so she invented a story. She sat Wiener down and informed him that when their daughter, Barbara, had stayed at McCulloch's house in Chicago, several of "his boys" had seduced her. Wiener immediately sent an angry telegram to Wiesner: "Please inform [Pitts and Lettvin] that all connection between me and your projects is permanently abolished. They are your problem. Wiener." He never spoke to Pitts again.
  16. ^ Gefter, Amanda (5 February 2015). "The Man Who Tried to Redeem the World with Logic". Nautilus.

Further reading

External links

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