McCulloch-Pitts-Wiener neurons?
Interesting article in the NYT about a new biography of Norbert Wiener, the father of the field of cybernetics. The surprising revelation is that Wiener (who received a PhD from Harvard in mathematical psychology at the age of 18) was “tricked” by his wife into stopping his collaboration with McCulloch, shortly before McCulloch went on to propose the perceptron with Walter Pitts.
The relevant portion is cited below…
But it was Margaret Wiener’s dream, the authors write, to be a high-status professor’s wife, presiding over an intellectual salon in the Teutonic mold. Instead, her husband had surrounded himself with a number of imaginative young students and protégés, as intent as he was on figuring out how the brain talks to itself and how machines could be made to perform similar feats.
One in particular incited her ire. He was Warren McCulloch, a neurophysiologist and free-wheeling bohemian with a thirst for alcohol and an inventive mind. The authors theorize that she disliked his way of life and at the same time feared he would threaten Wiener’s prominence at M.I.T. To prevent that, they say, she tried to quash plans for McCulloch and his associates to move to M.I.T.
When that failed, she told Wiener an invented story, that one or more of “the boys,” as Wiener called them, had seduced their elder daughter.
The authors say this explains why Wiener broke with the boys – immediately, utterly and apparently without a word of real explanation to anyone. Read from a distance of decades, it seems incredible that such a promising collaboration could have collapsed so completely. It is particularly poignant that Wiener, who suffered so much from paternal disdain, would abandon young men who thought of him as a father.
The boys waited in vain for Wiener’s antipathy to fade. Years later, scientists still wonder what their collaboration might have produced, had they continued to work together.