Warren Sturgis McCulloch

Warren Sturgis McCulloch ( born November 16, 1898 in Orange, New Jersey; † September 24, 1969 in Cambridge, Massachusetts ) was an American neurophysiologist and cybernetician.

Life

McCulloch attended Haverford College and studied philosophy and psychology at Yale University with a bachelor 's degree in 1921 and psychology at Columbia University with a master's degree (MA) in 1923. Afterwards, he studied medicine at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in MD Degree in 1927 followed by internship ( Internship ) at Bellevue Hospital in New York specializing in neurology. 1934 to 1941 he was at the Laboratory of Neurophysiology at Yale University, where he was most recently an Assistant Professor, and since 1941 associate professor and later professor of psychiatry at the Medical College of the University of Illinois at Chicago (Illinois Neuropsychiatric Institute). After 1952 McCulloch worked at MIT Research Laboratory of Electronics at the invitation of Jerome Wiesner (who in turn was followed by the advice of Norbert Wiener). McCulloch accepted because of the good research conditions, although this had the task his full professorship and lower payment result.

He became famous early work on neural networks and brain function in particular with Walter Pitts in the 1940s. Together with Pitts developed McCulloch McCulloch - Pitts model of the neuron, and they were able to show that Turing computable programs can be computed by a finite network of such artificial neurons. He was one of the founding fathers of neuroscience computer science. He further showed that the neuron is the essential logical unit in our brain. He conducted research at Yale, first with his mentor Dusser de Barenne, a pioneer of strychnine Neuronographie, on functional connections in the neocortex of monkeys and MIT on the physiology of neural circuits in the spinal cord and in the visual cortex of the frog with Humberto Maturana, Pitts, and Jerome ( Jerry ) Lettvin.

McCulloch was a founding member of the American Society for Cybernetics and its first president from 1967-1968 was.

He had broad interests, wrote poems and later designed houses and a dam on his farm in Old Lyme, Connecticut.

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