Warren McCulloch (November 16, 1899 - September 241969) was an American neurophysiologist and cybernetician.

Warren Sturgis McCulloch was born in Orange, New Jersey and studied at Yale (philosophy and psychology, A.B. degree in 1921) and Columbia (psychology, M.A. degree in 1923). Receiving his MD in 1927 from the College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York he undertook an internship at Bellevue Hospital , New York before returning to academia in 1934.

He is remembered for his work with Dusser de Barenne (Yale) and later Walter Pitts (Illinois) which provided the foundation for certain brain theories in a number of classic papers, including "A logical calculus of the ideas immanent in nervous activity" (1943) and "How we know universals: the perception of visual and auditory forms" (1947), both in the Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics. In the 1943 paper they demonstrated that a Turing machine program could be implemented in a finite network of formal neurons, that the neuron was the base logic unit of the brain. In the 1947 paper they offered approaches to designing "nervous nets" to recognize visual inputs despite changes in orientation or size.

From 1952 he worked at the MIT Research Laboratory of Electronics, working primarily on neural network modelling. His team examined the visual system of the frog in consideration of McCulloch's 1947 paper, discovering that the eye provides the brain with information that is already, to a degree, organized and interpreted, instead of simply transmitting an image. McCulloch also posited the concept of "poker chip" reticular formations as to how the brain deals with contradictory information in a democratic, somatotopical neural network.

He was a founder member of the American Society for Cybernetics and its first president from 1967-1968. He was a mentor to the British operational research pioneer Stafford Beer.

He met Alan Turing once, but Turing dismissed him as a 'charlatan'.

Warren McCulloch had a remarkable range of interests and talents. In addition to his scientific contributions he wrote poetry (sonets), and he designed and engineered buildings and a dam at his farm in Old Lyme, Conn. Hie died 1969 in Cambridge.

References

• New York Times. (1969). Obituaries. September 25.
• McCulloch, Warren S. (1965). Embodiments of Mind. Cambridge.