1920–2011 · neurologist and neurophysiologist, Chicago, MIT, Rutgers

he Chicago-born physician Jerome Ysroael Lettvin trained in medicine, served as an army neurologist in the Second World War and spent some years in psychiatry before joining McCulloch's group at MIT's Research Laboratory of Electronics. He stayed at MIT for most of his career and later taught at Rutgers.

what he did

With Maturana, McCulloch and Pitts he wrote "What the frog's eye tells the frog's brain" (Lettvin et al., 1959), which found that single fibres of the frog's optic nerve each report one feature of the scene: sustained edges, moving edges, dimming, and small dark moving convex objects. Maturana's companion paper on the anatomy (Maturana et al., 1960) matched the fibre types to cell types. The work built on Horace Barlow's recordings from the frog retina (Barlow, 1953), and was followed by work on the frog's nose (Gesteland, Lettvin & Pitts, 1965). See the archive page.

A frog optic-nerve fibre's receptive field answering a small dark convex moving object, a bug detector Lettvin, Maturana, McCulloch & Pitts, 1959. Drawn by script. credits

the witness

Lettvin was Pitts's friend from 1938 to the end, and his encyclopaedia entry (Lettvin, J. Y., 1999) and long interview (Anderson, J. A. & Rosenfeld, E. (eds.), 1998) are the main sources for Pitts's life and for the break with Wiener. He was not a neutral witness, and he did not claim to be. Some details of his account are contradicted elsewhere, and in one place he gives a date that cannot be right; we have left those out rather than repeat them.

why he is here

The frog paper is the first clear case of a feature detector, an idea that runs through Hubel and Wiesel into the convolutional network and the questions on brains and models compared.

in the tour: the room called "The frog's eye" has a placard called "What it cost" ···

Primary works and sources

1. Lettvin et al. (1959). What the Frog's Eye Tells the Frog's Brain. Proceedings of the IRE. doi:10.1109/JRPROC.1959.287207
2. Maturana et al. (1960). Anatomy and physiology of vision in the frog (Rana pipiens). The Journal of General Physiology. doi:10.1085/jgp.43.6.129
3. Barlow (1953). Summation and inhibition in the frog's retina. The Journal of Physiology. doi:10.1113/jphysiol.1953.sp004829
4. Gesteland, Lettvin & Pitts (1965). Chemical transmission in the nose of the frog. The Journal of Physiology. doi:10.1113/jphysiol.1965.sp007781
5. 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
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.
7. Hubel & Wiesel (1959). Receptive fields of single neurones in the cat's striate cortex. The Journal of Physiology. doi:10.1113/jphysiol.1959.sp006308

see also

	Walter Pitts
	archive: the frog
	the break