Short answers, pulled from the story.
Walter Pitts was an American logician born in Detroit, Michigan, on the 23rd of April 1923. He is best known for co-authoring the 1943 paper "A Logical Calculus of Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity" with Warren McCulloch, which proposed the first mathematical model of a neural network. The formalized neuron described in that paper is still called the McCulloch-Pitts neuron and remains the standard reference in the neural networks field.
The 1943 paper "A Logical Calculus of Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity" proposed the first mathematical model of a neural network, examining whether the nervous system could function as a universal computing device. Its central unit, a simple formalized neuron, is still the standard of reference in the field of neural networks and is known as the McCulloch-Pitts neuron.
Pitts burned his unpublished doctoral dissertation on probabilistic three-dimensional neural networks after the 1959 paper "What the Frog's Eye Tells the Frog's Brain" demonstrated that analog processes in the eye performed interpretive work in image processing, contradicting the purely digital-logical framework he had built his career on. He also destroyed years of other unpublished research at the same time.
Pitts earned only one degree, an Associate of Arts awarded by the University of Chicago in recognition of his work on the 1943 neural networks paper, after five years of unofficial study there. He refused all offers of advanced degrees at MIT, partly because accepting would have required him to sign his name publicly.
Pitts and McCulloch were brought into each other's orbit through Jerome Lettvin, who had been introduced to McCulloch in 1940 by the neuroanatomist Gerhardt von Bonin. In early 1942, McCulloch invited Pitts and Lettvin to live with his family, and the evening collaboration that followed produced their seminal 1943 paper.
From 1946 onward, Pitts was a core member of the Macy conferences, whose principal purpose was to establish the foundations for a general science of the workings of the human mind. These conferences were central to the development of cybernetics as a field.