A tough scientist

An article portrays the scientist's early life as son of a boiler maker of Detroit who communicated with his fists. He was chased around by neighborhood bullies.

He left home while still in his teens.

He went to local libraries and read Sanskrit, Greek and Latin as well as logic.

At age 12 he read 2000 pages of Bertrand Russell in three days and then sent in a critique. Russell invited him to come over to the UK.

At University of Chicago, a demanding university, he gatecrashed courses and lectures and did various tasks.

Then he challenged a professor of the Vienna Circle, Carnap, in person with a critique. 

 At age 17, Walter Pitts was given opportunity to an open research position at the University of Chicago. He was given housing by Warren McCulloch, who was interested in the collective neurons that contributed to the thinking process. An analogy was made that the brain performed like a computer, and vise versa.

In 1943, the two composed a notable paper, "A logical calculus of the ideas immanent in nervous activity". At the time considered a ground breaking venture in cybernetics. Walter was age 20. He researched at MIT.

Pitts was named in Fortune magazine in 1954, alongside James Watson.

He eventually became noted for providing an important contribution in science/technology.

Pitts based his PhD paper on probabilistic three-dimensional neural networks. A maddening mathematical pursuit.

He also sustained interest in other fields. He wanted to broaden out.

He started a magnum opus.  Then he stopped cold. A premise was to trace neural activity to the brain of animals. Most have visualization processed in the occipital lobe. He made logical predictions of how body systems worked. People were amazed. Then he came across frogs. He proposed a paper, "What frog's eyes tell the brain."

He found the eyes of frogs actually did some of the processing input, not the brain.

Stumped, Pitts burned his thesis. Ditched everything. Ended all his endeavors by 1959. He soon became an unknown. Other scientists did not associate him with their endeavors.

He tried a paper on frog's sense of smell. But alone, with alcohol. In May 1969 at a Cambridge boarding house he died at age 46.