Warren McCulloch

Warren Sturgis McCulloch (1898 to 1969) was an American neurophysiologist and cybernetician known for his work on the foundations of certain brain theories and his contribution to the cybernetics movement. Born in Orange, New Jersey, he studied philosophy and psychology at Yale, took a master's degree at Columbia and received his medical degree there in 1927. He worked at the Laboratory for Neurophysiology at Yale from 1934 to 1941, then at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he was professor of psychiatry and director of the Illinois Neuropsychiatric Institute until 1951, and from 1952 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology alongside Norbert Wiener. With Walter Pitts he created computational models based on mathematical algorithms called threshold logic. His 1943 paper A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity is widely credited as a seminal contribution to neural network theory, the theory of automata and the theory of computation. He was a founding member of the American Society for Cybernetics and its second president from 1967 to 1968.