Walter Pitts
1923-1969
Walter Pitts was born in Detroit on April 23, 1923. Pitts apparently ran away from home at the age of 15. Instead of joining the circus, he went to the University of Chicago, where he sat in on Bertrand Russell's lectures, and gave Rudolph Carnap a copy of Carnap's "Aufbau" with corrections and suggestions for improvements on office hour. Pitts never received a degree, despite the best efforts of Carnap and others, but he found a home in the house of Warren McCulloch. Pitts published "A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity" and a related note illustrating how the brain could be understood as a computational device in 1943. The paper and note appeared in the Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics. Interestingly, another paper by Pitts (with Jerry Lettvin) also appeared in that volume. This latter paper offers a mathematical theory of affective psychoses in terms if two variables; intensity of emotion and intensity of activity. Though the first paper is well known for influencing John von Neumann and the development of digital computing and cybernetics, the latter apparently was written as a practical joke. Pitts was first a graduate student in mathematics and then a lecturer at MIT from 1946-1969. From 1952-1969 he was part of the Electronics Research Laboratory at MIT, but he seemed to spend his time in bars reading. On May 14, 1969 Pitts died of bleeding from esophageal varices (abnormally swollen or dilated blood vessels).