20 Facts About Walter Pitts

Walter Pitts proposed landmark theoretical formulations of neural activity and generative processes that influenced diverse fields such as cognitive sciences and psychology, philosophy, neurosciences, computer science, artificial neural networks, cybernetics and artificial intelligence, together with what has come to be known as the generative sciences.

Walter Pitts is best remembered for having written along with Warren McCulloch, a seminal paper in scientific history, titled "A Logical Calculus of Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity".

Walter Pitts was born in Detroit, Michigan on April 23,1923, the son of Walter and Marie.

Walter Pitts was an autodidact who taught himself logic and mathematics and was able to read several languages including Greek and Latin.

Walter Pitts is widely remembered for having spent three days in a library, at the age of 12, reading Principia Mathematica and sent a letter to Bertrand Russell pointing out what he considered serious problems with the first half of the first volume.

The offer was not taken up; however, Pitts did decide to become a logician.

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

Walter Pitts met Carnap at Chicago by walking into his office during office hours, and presenting him with an annotated version of Carnap's recent book on logic, The Logical Syntax of Language.

Since Walter Pitts did not introduce himself, Carnap spent months searching for him, and, when he found him, he obtained for him a menial job at the university and had Walter Pitts study with him.

Walter Pitts mastered Carnap's abstract logic, then met with and was intrigued by the work of the Ukrainian mathematical physicist Nicolas Rashevsky, who was at Chicago and was the founder of mathematical biophysics, remodeling biology on the structure of the physical sciences and mathematical logic.

Walter Pitts worked closely with the mathematician Alston Scott Householder, who was a member of Rashevsky's group.

In 1941 Warren McCulloch took a position as professor of psychiatry at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and in early 1942 he invited Walter Pitts, who was still homeless, together with Lettvin to live with his family.

Walter Pitts was familiar with the work of Gottfried Leibniz on computing and they considered the question of whether the nervous system could be considered a kind of universal computing device as described by Leibniz.

In 1944, Walter Pitts was hired by Kellex Corporation in New York City, part of the Atomic Energy Project.

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

Walter Pitts wrote a large dissertation on the properties of neural nets connected in three dimensions.

Walter Pitts was described as an eccentric, refusing to allow his name to be made publicly available.

Walter Pitts continued to refuse all offers of advanced degrees or positions of authority at MIT, in part as he would have to sign his name.

Walter Pitts took little further interest in work, excepting only a collaboration with Lettvin and Robert Gesteland which produced a paper on olfaction in 1965.

Walter Pitts died in 1969 of bleeding esophageal varices, a condition usually associated with cirrhosis and alcoholism.