Walter Pitts

Walter Pitts was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1923. He taught himself logic and mathematics as a child and learned to read several languages, including Greek and Latin. Friends told the story that at twelve he read Bertrand Russell's Principia Mathematica in a library and wrote to Russell about problems in it. At fifteen he left home and went to Chicago, where he attended Russell's lectures at the University of Chicago without enrolling as a student. The logician Rudolf Carnap found the homeless young man a small job at the university and had him study logic. In 1942 the neuroscientist Warren McCulloch invited Pitts to live with his family, and in the evenings they worked together. Their paper 'A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity' (1943) proposed the first mathematical model of a neural network; its simplified 'McCulloch–Pitts neuron' is still a standard reference in the field. Pitts then moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to work with Norbert Wiener and took part in the Macy conferences on cybernetics. He died in 1969.

Walter Pitts is also an author in the library: author page and works.

Faith: Faith not well documented. Source: Wikipedia