hat is known about Walter Pitts, and who says so. The sources disagree on dates and causes; the break sets them side by side. The notes are our summaries.

in the tour: the room called "the room in the boarding house" has a placard called "What he burned" ···

1. McCulloch & Pitts (1943). A logical calculus of the ideas immanent in nervous activity. The Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics. doi:10.1007/BF02478259
   The paper. Nets of all-or-none neurons compute logical functions; with memory, as much as a Turing machine. Used in: Pitts
2. Pitts & McCulloch (1947). How we know universals: the perception of auditory and visual forms. The Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics. doi:10.1007/bf02478291
   How a net could recognise a form regardless of size or place, by averaging over transformations. Used in: the thesis that wasn't
3. Lettvin et al. (1959). What the Frog's Eye Tells the Frog's Brain. Proceedings of the IRE. doi:10.1109/JRPROC.1959.287207
   The frog's eye does its own interpreting, which undercut the 1943 picture of the brain as logic on raw inputs. Used in: archive
4. McCulloch, W. S. (1965). Embodiments of Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Paperback 1988 with an introduction by Seymour Papert; reissued 2016 with a foreword by Michael Arbib and Jerome Lettvin.
   McCulloch's collected papers, including the 1943 and 1947 papers with Pitts. Used in: McCulloch
5. Heims (1991). The Cybernetics Group. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
   A history of the Macy conferences and the people at them. Used in: timeline
6. Anderson, J. A. & Rosenfeld, E. (eds.) (1998). Talking Nets: An Oral History of Neural Networks. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Includes an interview with Jerome Lettvin.
   Oral histories; Lettvin's interview is the fullest first-hand account of Pitts. Used in: Lettvin
7. Lettvin, J. Y. (1999). "Pitts, Walter." In R. A. Wilson & F. C. Keil (eds.), The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ai.ato.ms/MITECS/Articles/lettvin1.html
   Lettvin's encyclopedia entry on his friend: short, exact, and the source of most of what is quoted. Used in: the break
8. Smalheiser (2000). Walter Pitts. Perspectives in Biology and Medicine. doi:10.1353/pbm.2000.0009
   A biographical essay tying the destruction of the thesis to the break. Used in: the break
9. Arbib (2000). Warren McCulloch's Search for the Logic of the Nervous System. Perspectives in Biology and Medicine. doi:10.1353/pbm.2000.0001
   McCulloch's programme, by a student of it. Used in: McCulloch
10. Piccinini (2004). The First Computational Theory of Mind and Brain: A Close Look at Mcculloch and Pitts's “Logical Calculus of Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity”. Synthese. doi:10.1023/B:SYNT.0000043018.52445.3e
    A careful reading of the 1943 paper and what it did and did not show. Used in: Pitts
11. Conway, F. & Siegelman, J. (2005). Dark Hero of the Information Age: In Search of Norbert Wiener, the Father of Cybernetics. New York: Basic Books.
    The biography of Wiener that reported the cause of the break. Used in: the break
12. Dyson, F. (2005). "The tragic tale of a genius." Review of Conway & Siegelman. The New York Review of Books, July 2005. www.nybooks.com/articles/2005/07/14/the-tragic-tale-of-a-genius/
    Dyson's review of it, which puts the break in 1951. Used in: the break
13. Brown (2006). Review of Conway & Siegelman, Dark Hero of the Information Age: In Search of Norbert Wiener, the Father of Cybernetics. Physics Today. doi:10.1063/1.2216967
    The Physics Today review of the same book. Used in: the break
14. Gefter, A. (2015). "The man who tried to redeem the world with logic." Nautilus, February 2015. nautil.us/the-man-who-tried-to-redeem-the-world-with-logic-235253/
    The long magazine account that brought Pitts back into view. Used in: Pitts
15. Abraham, T. H. (2016). Rebel Genius: Warren S. McCulloch's Transdisciplinary Life in Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
    The biography of McCulloch. Used in: McCulloch

see also

	Walter Pitts
	the break
	annotated: neuroscience