David Marr (neuroscientist)

David Marr (neuroscientist)

David Courtnay Marr (January 19, 1945 - November 17, 1980) was a British neuroscientist and psychologist. Marr integrated results from psychology, artificial intelligence, and neurophysiology into new models of visual processing. His work was very influential in Computational Neuroscience and led to a resurgence of interest in the discipline.

Born in Woodford, Essex, and educated at Rugby School; he was admitted at Trinity College, Cambridge on 1 October 1963 (having been awarded the Lees Knowles Rugby Exhibition). He was awarded the Coutts Trotter Scholarship in 1966 and obtained his BA in mathematics the same year and got his Ph.D. in physiology under Professor G.S. Brindley in 1972. His interest turned from general brain theory to visual processing. His doctoral dissertation was submitted in 1969 and described his model of the function of the cerebellum based mainly on anatomical and physiological data garnered from a book by J.C. Eccles. A similar model was later independently proposed by James S. Albus. Subsequently he worked at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he took on a faculty appointment in the Department of Psychology in 1977 and was subsequently made a tenured full professor in 1980. Marr proposed that understanding the brain requires an understanding of the problems it faces and the solutions it finds. He emphasized the need to avoid general theoretical debates and instead focus on understanding specific problems.

Marr died of leukemia in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Marr's findings are collected in the book Vision: A computational investigation into the human representation and processing of visual information (ISBN 0-7167-1567-8), which was published after his death and re-issued in 2010 by The MIT Press (see References). He was married to Lucia M. Vaina of Boston University's Department of Biomedical Engineering and Neurology. The Marr Prize, one of the most prestigious awards in computer vision, is named in his honor.