Walter Pitts

Walter Pitts (1923 to 1969) was an American logician who worked in computational neuroscience. Born in Detroit, he taught himself logic and mathematics as a child, and at fifteen left home for Chicago, where he attended Bertrand Russell's lectures and studied with Rudolf Carnap at the University of Chicago without registering as a student. With the psychiatrist Warren McCulloch he wrote A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity in 1943, which proposed the first mathematical model of a neural network; its simple formalised neuron is called the McCulloch-Pitts neuron. He later worked with Norbert Wiener at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology until their break in 1952, took part in the Macy conferences, and was a co-author of What the Frog's Eye Tells the Frog's Brain in 1959. His only earned degree was an Associate of Arts, and he burned his unpublished dissertation on three-dimensional neural networks.