Walter Pitts - Academic Career

Academic Career

Pitts probably continued to correspond with Betrand Russell; in any case, since his father was unappreciative of his intellectual endeavors and wanted him to leave school to go to work, he ran away from home at the age of 15 to attend Russell's lectures at the University of Chicago. He stayed there, without registering as a student. While there, in 1938 he met Jerome Lettvin, a pre-medical student, and the two became close friends. Bertrand Russell was a visiting professor at the University of Chicago in the Fall of 1938, and he directed Pitts to go study there with the logician Rudolf Carnap. 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 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 Pitts study with him. Pitts at the time was homeless and without income. He mastered Carnap's abstract logic, then met with and was intrigued by the work of the Russian mathematical physicist Nicolas Rashevsky, who was also at Chicago and was the founder of mathematical biophysics, remodeling biology on the structure of the physical sciences and mathematical logic. Pitts also worked closely with the mathematician Alston Householder who was part of Rashevsky's group.

Later Warren McCulloch also arrived at the University of Chicago, and in early 1942 invited Pitts, who was still homeless, together with Lettvin to live with his family. In the evenings McCulloch and Pitts collaborated. 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. This led to their seminal neural networks paper A Logical Calculus of Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity.

In 1943 Lettvin introduced Pitts to Norbert Wiener at MIT, who had recently lost his "right-hand man". Their first meeting, where they discussed Wiener's proof of the ergodic theorem, went so well that Pitts moved to Boston to work with Wiener. Pitts was a special student of Weiner's at MIT.

In 1944 Pitts was hired by Kellex Corporation (later acquired in 1950 by Vitro Corporation) in New York City, part of the Atomic Energy Project.

From 1946, 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.

In 1951 Wiener convinced Jerry Wiesner to hire some physiologists of the nervous system. A group was established with Pitts, Lettvin, McCulloch, and Pat Wall. Pitts wrote a large thesis on the properties of neural nets connected in three dimensions. Lettvin described him as "in no uncertain sense the genius of the group … when you asked him a question, you would get back a whole textbook". Pitts was also described as an eccentric, refusing to allow his name to be made publicly available. He refused all offers of advanced degrees or official positions at MIT as he would have to sign his name.

Pitts was part of the Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT from 1952-1969.