Neuroscientists, Mathematicians, Computerists 
On the shoulders of giants we see further
Calude
E. Shannon was born in Michigan on April 30, 1916. He was educated at
University of Michigan in 1936 with B.S. degree, and studied electrical
engineering and mathematics in MIT, received
both his master's degree and his doctorate in 1940. His classic paper
(based on Master thesis) "A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching
Circuits" showed how a logic machine could be built using switching
circuits corresponding to the propositions of Boolean algebra. Shannon is the
founding father of electronic communications age, his most influential paper "A
Mathematical Theory of Communication" had built the solid foundation
for information theory. He is an American mathematical engineer, whose work on
technical and engineering problems within the communications industry, laying
the groundwork for both the computer industry and telecommunications. Shannon
joined the mathematics department at Bell
Labs in 1941 and remained affiliated with the Labs until 1972. He became a
visiting professor at MIT in 1956, a permanent member of the faculty in 1958,
and a professor emeritus in 1978.. The mathematical theory of communication was
the climax of Shannon's mathematical and engineering investigations. He is also
the leading pioneer of artificial intelligence and machine learning, he is
well-known for his clever design of electromechanical mouse "Theseus",
chess-playing, maze-solving, juggling and mind-reading machines. Dr.
Shannon died in Feb. 26 before his 84th birthday.
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Alan
Turing is the father of computer science, mathematician and
philosopher. He was born in June 23, 1912 in London, he was educated in King's
College, Cambridge University from 1931 to 1934. In 1932-35, he began studying
quantum mechanics, probability, logic and he was elected the fellow of King's
College, Cambridge in 1935. In 1934, he published the paper "On
Computable Numbers with an Application to the Entscheidungs-problem"
which involved the concepts of logical design and the universal machine. In
1936, he published the important paper about Turing machine. He studied in
Princeton University in 1936-1938 and did his dissertation under Alonzo Church,
where his Ph.D. Papers in concerned about logic, algebra, number theory (at that
time he also communicated with mathematician John von Neumann). In 1939-1940, he
built Bombe, the machine for Enigma decryption. During the World War II,
he joined the group of breaking of U-boat Enigma cipher, saving battle of the
Atlantic. After the War, he came to National Physical Laboratory, London and
studied the computer and wrote some papers on programming, neural nets,
artificial intelligence. In 1950, he wrote the philosophical paper on machine
intelligence: the Turing test. Turing's work also involved physics and biology.
He died as a genius by cyanide poisoning in June 7, 1954.
N.B. It was reported Alan Turing once worked with Claude Shannon at Bell Labs to build an encrypted voice phone that would allow Roosevelt to have live, secure transatlantic strategic conversations across the pond with Churchill in World War II.
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John
von Neumann is the father of modern computer science as a brilliant
mathematician. He was born in Born 28 December 1903, Budapest, Hungary; Died 8
February 1957, Washington DC. Von Neumann was a child prodigy, born into a
banking family is Budapest, Hungary. When only six years old he could divide
eight-digit numbers in his head. He was educated in University of Budapest,
1921; University of Berlin, 1921-23; Chemical Engineering, Swiss Federal
Institute of Technology, 1923-25; Doctorate, Mathematics (with minors in
experimental physics and chemistry), University of Budapest, 1926, D.Sc (Hon),
Princeton University, 1947, D.Sc. (Hon), University of Pennsylvania, 1950; D.Sc.
(Hon), Harvard University, 1950; D.Sc. (Hon), University of Istanbul, 1952;
D.Sc. (Hon), Case Institute of Technology, 1952; D.Sc. (Hon), University of
Maryland, 1952; D.Sc. (Hon), Institute of Polytechnics, Munich, 1953. He became
a professor of Mathematics, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton University,
1933-57. During the war, von Neumann's expertise in hydrodynamics, ballistics,
meteorology, game theory, and statistics, was put to good use in several
projects. This work led him to consider the use of mechanical devices for
computation, and although the stories about von Neumann imply that his first
computer encounter was with the ENIAC, based on the infrastructure which is now
known as the "von Neumann Architecture".
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Norbert
Wiener was born in November 26, 1894 in Columbia, Missouri, USA and
died on March 18, 1964 in Stockholm, Sweden. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard
at the age of 18 with a dissertation on mathematical logic. From Harvard he went
to Cambridge, England to study under Russell,
then he went to Göttingen to study under Hilbert.
He was influence by both Hilbert
and Russell
but also, perhaps to an even greater degree, by Hardy.
After various occupations (journalist, university teacher, engineer, writer) in
which he was very unhappy, he began a long association with MIT in 1919. His
work on generalized harmonic analysis and Tauberian theorems won the Bôcher
Prize in 1933 when he received the prize from the American Mathematical Society
for his memoir Tauberian theorems published in Annals of Mathematics
in the previous year. Wiener had an extraordinarily wide range of interests and
contributed to many areas including cybernetics (a term he coined), stochastic
processes, quantum theory and during World War II he worked on gunfire control.
Some of Wiener's most important publications include The Fourier Integral,
and Certain of Its Applications (1933), Cybernetics: or, Control and
Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948), Nonlinear Problems in
Random Theory (1958).
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Rudolph
E. Kalman was born in Hungary, he received BS and MS degrees from the MIT
and a D.Sc. in engineering from Columbia University (1957). In the early years
of his career he held research positions at IBM and at the Research Institute
for Advanced Studies in Baltimore. From 1962 to 1971, he was at Stanford
University. In 1971, he became a graduate research professor and director of the
Center for Mathematical System Theory at the University of Florida. Kalman's
contributions to control theory and to applied mathematics and engineering in
general have been widely recognized. He is a control theorist who is
"without a doubt the most influential researcher in the field",
provides "additional evidence, if more was needed, that the field of
systems and control is now an established part of mathematics and science".
The Kalman filter in name of him, is based on the use of state-space techniques
and recursive algorithms, revolutionized the field of estimation. During the
1960s, Kalman was the leader in the development of a rigorous theory of control
systems. Among his many outstanding contributions were the formulation and study
of most fundamental state-space notions (including controllability,
observability, minimality, realizability from input/output data, matrix Riccati
equations, linear-quadratic control, and the separation principle) that are
today ubiquitous in control. During the 1970s Kalman played a major role in the
introduction of algebraic and geometric techniques in the study of linear and
nonlinear control systems. His work since the 1980s has focused on a
system-theoretic approach to the foundations of statistics, econometric
modeling, and identification, as a natural complement to his earlier studies of
minimality and realizability.
He received the IEEE's highest award, the Medal of Honor (1974), and the American Mathematical Society's Steele Prize (1986), which recognized the fundamental importance of the papers on linear filtering Kalman published in 1960 and 1961. Kalman is a member of the French, Hungarian, and Russian Academies of Sciences and of the National Academy of Engineering and National Academic of Sciences, and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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Marvin
Minsky received the BA and PhD in mathematics at Harvard and Princeton.
Minsky is one of pioneers in artificial intelligence. He has made many
contributions to AI, cognitive psychology, mathematics, computational
linguistics, robotics, and optics, now he is Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and
Sciences, and Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, at the
MIT. In 1951 he built the first randomly wired neural network learning
machine (called SNARC, for Stochastic Neural-Analog Reinforcement Computer),
based on the reinforcement of simulated synaptic transmission coefficients. His
1954 doctorate thesis "Theory of
Neural-Analog Reinforcement Systems and Its Applications to the Brain-Model
Problem" was mainly concerned about neural networks. He is also the
inventor of mechanical hands, robots, the confocal
scanning microscope ( when he is still an undergraduate), the
"Muse" synthesizer for musical variations (with E. Fredkin), and the
first LOGO "turtle" (with Seymour Papert). In 1959, Minsky and John
McCarthy founded what became the MIT AI Laboratory, and his long tenure as its
co-director placed his imprint upon the entire field of Artificial Intelligence.
His seminal 1961 paper, "Steps Towards
Artificial Intelligence" surveyed and analyzed all of what had been
done before, and set forth the major problems of that infant discipline. The
1963 paper, "Matter, Mind, and Models" addressed the problem
of making self-aware machines.
He is the member of the National Academy of Science, National Academy of Engineering. He has received the ACM Turing Award, the MIT Killian Award, the Japan Prize, the IJCAI Research Excellence Award, and the Rank Prize for Optoelectronics. His two important books are Perceptrons (with Seymour Pappert, 1969, 1980) and The Society of Mind (1987).
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Hermann Haken
was born in
Germany
He is the senior editor of the Springer series books on Synergetics, Advanced Computers, Information
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David Marr was born in 1945 and died in 1980. David Marr was a British psychologist who made important contributions to the study of visual processing. In doing so, he integrated results from psychology, artificial intelligence, and neurophysiology. His classic book, Vision: A computational investigation into the human representation and processing of visual information, is considered one of the most important works in cognitive science. He pioneered the mathematical analysis of vision. In his research, he studied such questions as how depth is perceived, how motion is perceived, and what defines boundaries in the visual field. He claimed that to process nearly infinite combinations, the brain must operate on visual information in certain mathematical ways and have the ability to be finely tuned on many different scales. He intensively studied the fly visual system, working out many of its details. His work has been incredibly important, not only in the understanding of human vision, but in creating the possibility of machine vision. In addition to his work on vision, Marr developed a general account of information-processing systems in terms of three levels of analysis: (1) the level of computational theory of the system, (2) the level of algorithm and representation, which are used make computations, and (3) the level of implementation: the underlying hardware or "machinery" on which the computations are carried out.
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Warren
McCulloch received his MA in Psychology from Columbia University. He also
attended Yale University where he received his BA in Philosophy and Psychology. Warren
S. McCulloch is the the co-developer (with Walter Pitts) for the famous M-P
neuron model (the classic paper "A Logical Calculus of Ideas Immanent in
Nervous Activity", 1943), which is the basic foundation of computational
neuroscience, most of neural networks are based on the M-P neuron model. His
book Embodiments of Mind (MIT Press, 1965, 1969; 1988) has made a great impact
on the neuroscience research.
Warren McCulloch (1898-1968) was a physician turned physiologist. After medical school, he trained in neurology from 1928 - 1931, studied mathematical physics in 1931 - 1932, worked as a clinician from 1932 - 34, then joined the Yale Laboratory of Neurophysiology and by 1941 became an assistant professor in the department. His main work at Yale was on the functional connections in the CEREBRAL CORTEX of primates. Dusser de Barenne, his mentor and collaborator, had developed the method of strychnine neuronography, a way of determining the direct projection of one architectonically specified region in the cortex of the forebrain to other regions. It is a clever and reliable technique that served well to show in a single day of experiment what would take years to work out by the standard anatomical procedures at the time. Little of what the technique revealed has been faulted, but it never caught on for a variety of reasons, the main one being a general misunderstanding of the underlying physiology.
Walter Pitts was born in 1923, vanished from the scene in the late 1950s, and died at the end of the 1960s, having destroyed, as much as he could, any traces of his past existence. He is a peculiarly difficult subject for a biography because, although he remains a vividly haunting memory to those who knew him, he seems only a group delusion to others. At least that was the opinion of the neurologist Norman GESCHWIND.
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Donald
O. Hebb was born in 1904 at Chester, Nova Scotia, Canada, and died in 1985.
He got the Ph. D. Psychology, Harvard University in 1936. Donald Hebb began his
adult life intending to be a novelist, and decided that his calling required an
understanding of psychology. He became one of the most influential psychologists
of his time after he embarked on a course that led him into two decades of
research, working with researchers like Penfield and Lashley. Hebb spent most of
his academic career at Psychology Department of McGill
University in Montreal, where he became an influential theorist concerned
with the relation between the brain and behavior. His most important book, The Organization of Behavior (Wiley,
1949), was influential in the development of connectionism. That book is a
keystone of modern neuroscience that broke new ground by positing neural
structures, called cell assemblies, which were formed through the action of
feedback loops or what is now called the Hebb synapse. The cell-assembly theory
guided Hebb's landmark experiments on the influence of early environment on
adult intelligence. It foreshadowed neural network theory, an active line of
research in artificial intelligence. Hebb took a biological approach to
psychology and became one of the first brain theorists of modern times. He
combined behavioral and neurophysiological approaches to psychology. His A
Textbook of Psychology promoted his psychobiological position and was eventually
translated into 11 languages.
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Dennis
Gabor was born in Budapest, Hungary, on June 5, 1900 and died in 1979. He
is the recipient of 1971 Nobel Prize in physics for his contributions in optical
holography. He acquired his degrees, (Diploma at the Technische
Hochschule Berlin, 1924, Dr-Ing. in 1927) in electrical engineering. His
life-long love of physics started suddenly at the age of 15 when he began to
study the calculus. He was attracted then by Abbe's theory of the microscope and
by Gabriel Lippmann's method of color photography, which played such a great
part in his work 30 years later. During his university education, he often
visited University of Berlin, where at that time had many physician giants
including Einstein and Planck. His doctorate work was the development of one of
the first high speed cathode ray oscillographs and in the course of this I made
the first iron-shrouded magnetic electron lens. During 1940s and 1950s he and
his colleagues had carried out the basic experiments in holography, at that time
called "wavefront reconstruction". The original objective was an
improved electron microscope, capable of resolving atomic lattices and seeing
single atoms. Dr. Gabor also made great contributions to communication theory.
His classic paper "Theory
of Communication" (1946) was published 2 years earlier than
another classic paper by Claude Shannon. Dr. Gabor is the Fellow of the Royal
Society, 1956, Hononary Member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, 1964,
the recipient of Albert Michelson Medal of The Franklin Institute, 1968, Rumford
Medal of the Royal Society, 1968, Medal of Honor of the Institution of
Electrical and Electronic Engineers,1970, Prix Holweck of the French Physical
Society, 1971.
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David
Hilbert was bron on 23 Jan 1862 in Königsberg, Prussia
(now Kaliningrad, Russia) and died on 14 Feb 1943 in
Göttingen, Germany. He attended the gymnasium
in his home town of Königsberg. After graduating from the gymnasium, he entered
the University of Königsberg. There he went on to study under Lindemann
for his doctorate which he received in 1885 for a thesis entitled Über
invariante Eigenschaften specieller binärer Formen, insbesondere der
Kugelfunctionen. One of Hilbert's friends there was Minkowski,
who was also a doctoral student at Königsberg, and they were to strongly
influence each others mathematical progress.
Hilbert's eminent position in the world of mathematics after 1900 meant that other institutions would have liked to tempt him to leave Göttingen and, in 1902, the University of Berlin offered Hilbert Fuchs' chair. Hilbert turned down the Berlin chair, but only after he had used the offer to bargain with Göttingen and persuade them to set up a new chair to bring his friend Minkowski to Göttingen.
Hilbert's first work was on invariant theory and, in 1888, he proved his famous Basis Theorem. Twenty years earlier Gordan had proved the finite basis theorem for binary forms using a highly computational approach. Attempts to generalise Gordan's work to systems with more than two variables failed since the computational difficulties were too great. Hilbert himself tried at first to follow Gordan's approach but soon realised that a new line of attack was necessary. He discovered a completely new approach which proved the finite basis theorem for any number of variables but in an entirely abstract way. Although he proved that a finite basis existed his methods did not construct such a basis.
Hilbert's work in geometry had the greatest influence in that area after Euclid. A systematic study of the axioms of Euclidean geometry led Hilbert to propose 21 such axioms and he analysed their significance. He published Grundlagen der Geometrie in 1899 putting geometry in a formal axiomatic setting. The book continued to appear in new editions and was a major influence in promoting the axiomatic approach to mathematics which has been one of the major characteristics of the subject throughout the 20th century.Hilbert's famous 23 Paris problems challenged (and still today challenge) mathematicians to solve fundamental questions. Hilbert's famous speech The Problems of Mathematics was delivered to the Second International Congress of Mathematicians in Paris.
Many have claimed that in 1915 Hilbert discovered the correct field equations for general relativity before Einstein but never claimed priority. The article however, shows that this view is in error. In this paper the authors show convincingly that Hilbert submitted his article on 20 November 1915, five days before Einstein submitted his article containing the correct field equations. Einstein's article appeared on 2 December 1915 but the proofs of Hilbert's paper (dated 6 December 1915) do not contain the field equations.
Hilbert contributed to many branches of mathematics, including invariants, algebraic number fields, functional analysis, integral equations, mathematical physics, and the calculus of variations.
Hilbert received many honours. In 1905 the Hungarian Academy of Sciences gave a special citation for Hilbert. In 1930 Hilbert retired and the city of Königsberg made him an honorary citizen of the city. He gave an address which ended with six famous words showing his enthusiasm for mathematics and his life devoted to solving mathematical problems: We must know, we shall know.
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Andrey
Nikolaevich Kolmogorov was born on April 25, 1903 in Tambov, Russia, and
died on October 20, 1987 in Moscow. He is regarded as one of greatest
mathematician in this century. Kolmogorov graduated from Moscow State University
in 1925 and began research under Luzin's
supervision in that year. It is remarkable that Kolmogorov published eight
papers in 1925, all written while he was still an undergraduate. Another
milestone occurred in 1925, namely Kolmogorov's first paper on probability
appeared. This was published jointly with Khinchin
and contains the 'three series' theorem as well as results on inequalities of
partial sums of random variables which would become the basis for martingale
inequalities and the stochastic calculus. In 1929 Kolmogorov completed his
doctorate. By this time he had 18 publications, among which involve the strong
law of large numbers and the law of the iterated logarithm, some generalizations
of the operations of differentiation and integration. During his academic
career, Kolmogorov had made great contributions on Probability Theory, Markov
process, Diffusion Theory, turbulent flow, dynamical systems, and complexity, Hilbert's sixth and thirteenth problem. In 1939 he was elected to
the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. He was also elected to the many other
academies and societies including the Romanian Academy of Sciences (1956), the
Royal Statistical Society of London (1956), the Loopoldina Academy of Germany
(1959), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1959), the London
Mathematical Society (1959), the American Philosophical Society (1961), The
Indian Statistical Institute (1962), the Netherlands Academy of Sciences (1963),
the Royal Society of London (1964), the National Academy of the United States
(1967), the French Academy of Sciences (1968).
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Ronald
Fisher was born in 1890 in East Finchley, London. Fisher was a student at a
time when there was still controversy about Darwin's theories and when Mendel's
work on genes had just been rediscovered. He received a B.A. in astronomy from
Cambridge in 1912. There he studied the theory of errors under Stratton using Airy's
manual on the Theory of Errors. It was Fisher's interest in the theory of
errors in astronomical observations that eventually led him to investigate
statistical problems.
Fisher made important discoveries in statistics (eg. maximum likelihood), genetics, selection and (genetic) dominance. It could be said that he invented a large part of modern statistics. Fisher was brilliant, an idealist and in some ways naive.
In 1921 he introduced the concept of likelihood. The likelihood of a parameter is proportional to the probability of the data and it gives a function which usually has a single maximum value, which he called the maximum likelihood. The contributions Fisher made included the development of methods suitable for small samples, like those of Gosset, the discovery of the precise distributions of many sample statistics and the invention of analysis of variance. He introduced the term maximum likelihood and studied hypothesis testing. Fisher is considered one of the founders of modern statistics because of his many important contributions.
He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1929, was awarded the Royal Medal of the Society in 1938 and he was awarded the Darwin Medal of the Society in 1948. In 1955, he was awarded the Copley Medal of the Royal Society.
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Emanuel
Parzen received his PhD from the University of California at Berkeley
in 1953 under the direction of Michel Loeve. His long and storied career has
taken him to Columbia University (from 1953 to 1956), Stanford University (from
1956 to 1970), SUNY Buffalo (from 1970 to 1978), and finally to Texas A&M
where he has been a distinguished professor since 1978.
Generations of statisticians (and in fact scientists of many varieties) have learned probability and stochastic processes from his remarkable textbooks. He is one of the fathers of modern time series analysis and probability density estimation, with the Parzen window being one of the most recognizable functions in all of statistics.
Professor Parzen's enthusiasm, scholarly accomplishments and general promotion of the field of statistics have made him one of the most recognized statisticians in the world.
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Vladimir
N. Vapnik received Doctorate degree from Russia. Dr. Vapnik is a
mathematician and statistician. He has made a great impact on supervised machine
learning and statistical learning theory,
particularly on VC (Vapnik-Chervonenkis) dimension, support vector machine and kernel learning. Now
he is the scientist of AT&T
laboratory, he is also the invited professor in Univerisity of
London. Dr. Vapnik is the author of two
influential books in statistical learning theory: On the Nature of
Statistical Learning Theory (Springer-Verlag, 1995) and Statistical
Learning Theory (Wiley, 1998).
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Lotfi
A. Zadeh was born in Iran. He received B.S. in University of Teheran,
MS. in MIT, and Ph.D. in Columbia University. Until 1965, Dr. Zadeh's work had
been centered on system theory and decision analysis. Since then, his research
interests have shifted to the theory of fuzzy sets and its applications to
artificial intelligence, linguistics, logic, decision analysis, control theory,
expert systems and neural networks. He was affiliated with Columbia,
Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, MIT, IBM, Stanford, Berkeley, where
he served as chairman of Department of Electrical Engineering. Currently
he is a Professor in the Graduate School, and is serving as the Director of BISC
(Berkeley Initiative in Soft Computing). In 1992, Prof. Zadeh was awarded the IEEE
Richard W. Hamming Medal "For seminal contributions to information science
and systems, including the conceptualization of fuzzy sets." He has
published extensively on a wide variety of subjects relating to the conception,
design and analysis of information/intelligent systems, and is serving on the
editorial boards of over fifty journals. Lotfi Zadeh is a Fellow of the IEEE,
AAAS, ACM, AAAI, and IFSA. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering
and a Foreign Member of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences.
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