— Ch. 1 · From Pulpit To Laboratory —
Warren Sturgis McCulloch.
~3 min read · Ch. 1 of 6
Warren Sturgis McCulloch was born in Orange, New Jersey on the 16th of November 1898. He originally planned to join the Christian ministry as a teenager. During those early years he associated with theologians like Henry Sloane Coffin and Harry Emerson Fosdick. Rufus Jones mentored him while he attended Haverford College. The path shifted when he studied philosophy and psychology at Yale University. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree there in 1921. Columbia University followed for his Master of Arts degree in 1923. An internship at Bellevue Hospital in New York came next. He earned his MD from the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1927. Later work under Eilhard von Domarus took place at Rockland State Hospital for the Insane. Academia called him back in 1934. He worked at the Laboratory for Neurophysiology at Yale University until 1941.
The Logic Of Nervous Activity
A paper published in 1943 changed how scientists viewed the brain forever. Warren Sturgis McCulloch collaborated with Walter Pitts on this project. They titled it A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity. This document appeared in the Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics Volume 5. Their work described memories forming through neural networks containing loops. These loops could encode sentences like There was some x such that x was a ψ. Any looped neural network proved equivalent to a sentence in first-order logic with equality. The pair showed these systems were equal in logical expressiveness. They also demonstrated how neural networks operated over time. Spatial objects like geometric figures received further development in their 1947 paper. The neuron became the base logic unit of the brain according to their model. A Turing machine program could be implemented in a finite network of formal neurons. This split inquiry into biological processes and artificial intelligence applications.