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Warren Sturgis McCulloch

 

 
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Warren Sturgis McCulloch
 
 
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Warren Sturgis McCulloch (November 16, 1898 – September 24, 1969) was an American
United States

The United States of America is a Federal government constitutional republic comprising U.S. state and a federal district. The country is situated mostly in central North America, where its Contiguous United States and Washington, D.C., the Capital districts and territories, lie between the Pacific Ocean and Atlantic Oceans, Borders of the U...
 neurophysiologist and cybernetician
Cybernetics

Cybernetics is the interdisciplinary study of the structure of regulatory systems. Cybernetics is closely related to control theory and systems theory....
, known for his work on the foundation for certain brain theories and his contribution to the cybernetics movement.

en Sturgis McCulloch was born in Orange
Orange, New Jersey

The City of Orange is a township in Essex County, New Jersey, New Jersey, United States. As of the United States 2000 Census, the township population was 32,868....
, New Jersey
New Jersey

New Jersey is a state in the Mid-Atlantic States and Northeastern United States regions of the United States. It is bordered on the north by New York, on the east by the Hudson River and the Atlantic Ocean, on the southwest by Delaware, and on the west by Pennsylvania....
, in 1899. He attended Haverford
Haverford College

Haverford College is a highly selective, private university, coeducational Liberal arts colleges in the United States located in Haverford, Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia....
 and studied philosophy and psychology at Yale
Yale University

Yale University is a private university in New Haven, Connecticut. Founded in 1701 as the Collegiate School, Yale is the Colonial Colleges institution of higher education in the United States and is a member of the Ivy League....
, where he received an A.B. degree in 1921.






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Warren Sturgis McCulloch (November 16, 1898 – September 24, 1969) was an American
United States

The United States of America is a Federal government constitutional republic comprising U.S. state and a federal district. The country is situated mostly in central North America, where its Contiguous United States and Washington, D.C., the Capital districts and territories, lie between the Pacific Ocean and Atlantic Oceans, Borders of the U...
 neurophysiologist and cybernetician
Cybernetics

Cybernetics is the interdisciplinary study of the structure of regulatory systems. Cybernetics is closely related to control theory and systems theory....
, known for his work on the foundation for certain brain theories and his contribution to the cybernetics movement.

Biography

Warren Sturgis McCulloch was born in Orange
Orange, New Jersey

The City of Orange is a township in Essex County, New Jersey, New Jersey, United States. As of the United States 2000 Census, the township population was 32,868....
, New Jersey
New Jersey

New Jersey is a state in the Mid-Atlantic States and Northeastern United States regions of the United States. It is bordered on the north by New York, on the east by the Hudson River and the Atlantic Ocean, on the southwest by Delaware, and on the west by Pennsylvania....
, in 1899. He attended Haverford
Haverford College

Haverford College is a highly selective, private university, coeducational Liberal arts colleges in the United States located in Haverford, Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia....
 and studied philosophy and psychology at Yale
Yale University

Yale University is a private university in New Haven, Connecticut. Founded in 1701 as the Collegiate School, Yale is the Colonial Colleges institution of higher education in the United States and is a member of the Ivy League....
, where he received an A.B. degree in 1921. He continued to study psychology at Columbia
Columbia University

Columbia University in the City of New York , is a private university in the United States and a member of the Ivy League. Columbia's main campus lies in the Morningside Heights, Manhattan neighborhood in the borough of Manhattan, in New York City....
 and received a M.A. degree in 1923. Receiving his MD in 1927 from the College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York
New York

The State of New York is a U.S. state in the Mid-Atlantic States and Northeastern United States regions of the United States and is the nation's List of U.S....
, he undertook an internship at Bellevue Hospital, New York, before returning to academia in 1934.

He worked at the Laboratory for Neurophysiology at Yale University from 1934 to 1941, before moving to the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Illinois, Chicago.

From 1952 he worked at the MIT
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private university research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Massachusetts, United States....
 Research Laboratory of Electronics. He also worked at Yale University and later at the University of Chicago
University of Chicago

The University of Chicago is a private university located principally in the Hyde Park, Chicago neighborhood of Chicago. Although an older university by the same name existed prior to its founding, the modern University of Chicago credits its founding to the oil magnate John D....
.

He was a founding member of the American Society for Cybernetics
American Society for Cybernetics

The American Society for Cybernetics is an organization for interdisciplinary collaboration and synthesis of Cybernetics....
 and its second president during 1967–1968. He was a mentor to the British operations research
Operations research

Operations Research in the USA, South Africa and Australia, and Operational Research in Europe and Canada, is an interdisciplinary branch of applied mathematics and formal science that uses methods such as mathematical modeling, statistics, and algorithms to arrive at optimal or near optimal solutions to complex problems....
 pioneer Stafford Beer.

Warren McCulloch had a remarkable range of interests and talents. In addition to his scientific contributions he wrote poetry (sonnet
Sonnet

The sonnet is one of the Poetry that can be found in lyric poetry from Europe.The term "sonnet" derives from the Occitan word sonet and the Italian language word sonetto, both meaning "little song"....
s), and he designed and engineered buildings and a dam at his farm in Old Lyme, Connecticut. He died in Cambridge
Cambridge, Massachusetts

Cambridge is a city in the Greater Boston area of Massachusetts, United States. It was named in honor of the University of Cambridge in England....
 in 1969.

Work

He is remembered for his work with Dusser de Barenne from Yale
Yale University

Yale University is a private university in New Haven, Connecticut. Founded in 1701 as the Collegiate School, Yale is the Colonial Colleges institution of higher education in the United States and is a member of the Ivy League....
 and later with Walter Pitts
Walter Pitts

Walter Pitts was a logician who worked in the field of cognitive psychology.He proposed landmark theoretical formulations of neural activity and emergent processes that influenced diverse fields such as cognitive sciences and psychology, philosophy, neurosciences, computer science, artificial neural networks, cybernetics and artificial in...
 from the University of Chicago
University of Chicago

The University of Chicago is a private university located principally in the Hyde Park, Chicago neighborhood of Chicago. Although an older university by the same name existed prior to its founding, the modern University of Chicago credits its founding to the oil magnate John D....
. Here he provided the foundation for certain brain theories in a number of classic papers, including "A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity" (1943) and "How We Know Universals: The Perception of Auditory and Visual Forms" (1947), both published in the Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics. This last paper is widely credited with being a seminal contribution to neural network theory, the theory of automata, the theory of computation, and cybernetics.

Neural network modelling

In the 1943 paper they attempted to demonstrate that a Turing machine
Turing machine

Turing machines are basic abstract symbol-manipulating devices which, despite their simplicity, can be adapted to simulate the logic of any computer algorithm....
 program could be implemented in a finite network of formal neuron
Neuron

Neurons are responsive cell in the nervous system that process and transmit information by electrochemical Signal . They are the core components of the brain, the vertebrate spinal cord, the invertebrate ventral nerve cord, and the peripheral nerves....
s, (in the event, the Turing Machine contains their model of the brain, but the converse is not true) that the neuron was the base logic unit of the brain. In the 1947 paper they offered approaches to designing "nervous nets" to recognize visual inputs despite changes in orientation or size.

From 1952 he worked at the MIT
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private university research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Massachusetts, United States....
 Research Laboratory of Electronics, working primarily on neural network
Neural network

Traditionally, the term neural network had been used to refer to a network or circuit of neuron. The modern usage of the term often refers to artificial neural networks, which are composed of artificial neurons or nodes....
 modelling. His team examined the visual system of the frog
Frog

Frogs are amphibians in the order Anura , formerly referred to as Salientia . The name frog derives from Old English language frogga, , cognate with Sanskrit plava , probably deriving from Proto-Indo-European language praw = "to jump"....
 in consideration of McCulloch's 1947 paper, discovering that the eye provides the brain with information that is already, to a degree, organized and interpreted, instead of simply transmitting an image.

Reticular formation

McCulloch also posited the concept of "poker chip" reticular formation
Reticular formation

The reticular formation is a part of the brain that is involved in actions such as awaking/sleep cycle, and filtering incoming stimuli to discriminate irrelevant background stimuli....
s as to how the brain deals with contradictory information in a democratic, somatotopical neural network. His principle of "Redundancy of Potential Command" was developed by von Forster
Heinz von Foerster

Heinz von Foerster was an Austrian American scientist combining physics and philosophy. Together with Warren McCulloch, Norbert Wiener, John von Neumann, Lawrence J....
 and Pask
Gordon Pask

Andrew Gordon Speedie Pask was an England cybernetics and psychology who made significant contributions to cybernetics, educational psychology, experimental epistemology and educational technology....
 in their study of Self-organization
Self-organization

Self-organization is a process of attraction and VSEPR theory in which the internal organization of a system, normally an open system , increases in complexity without being guided or managed by an outside source....
.

Publications

McCulloch wrote a book and several articles:
  • 1965. Embodiments of Mind. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
  • 1993. The complete works of Warren S. McCulloch. Intersystems Publications: Salinas, CA.


Articles, a selection:
  • 1943. "A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity". With: Walter Pitts
    Walter Pitts

    Walter Pitts was a logician who worked in the field of cognitive psychology.He proposed landmark theoretical formulations of neural activity and emergent processes that influenced diverse fields such as cognitive sciences and psychology, philosophy, neurosciences, computer science, artificial neural networks, cybernetics and artificial in...
    . In: Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics Vol 5, pp 115-133.
  • 1945. "A Heterarchy of Values Determined by the Topology of Nervous Nets". In: Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics, 7, 1945, 89-93.
  • 1959. . With Jerome Lettvin
    Jerome Lettvin

    Jerome Ysroael Lettvin is a Cognitive science and professor Emeritus of Electrical and Bioengineering and Communications Physiology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ....
    , H.R. Maturana and W.H. Pitts In: Proc. of the I. R. E. Vol 47 (11).
  • 1969, , publiced in: ASC FORUM Volume VI, Number 2 -Summer 1974.


Papers Published by the Chicago Literary Club:
  • 1945, .
  • 1959 .
  • 1959, .


Further reading

  • New York Times (1969), Obituaries, September 25.
  • Crevier, Daniel (1993), AI: The Tumultuous Search for Artificial Intelligence, BasicBooks, New York, NY.