McCulloch e Pitts

Una storia molto interessante, quella dell'incontro e della collaborazione di McCulloch e Pitts, il primo uno dei fondatori delle neuroscienze e il secondo un matematico. Il primo un intellettuale proveniente da una ricca famiglia della East Coast, il secondo una sorta di barbone senza un'istruzione istituzionale.
"McCulloch explained to Pitts that he was trying to model the brain with a Leibnizian logical calculus. He had been inspired by the Principia, in which Russell and Whitehead tried to show that all of mathematics could be built from the ground up using basic, indisputable logic. Their building block was the proposition—the simplest possible statement, either true or false. From there, they employed the fundamental operations of logic, like the conjunction (“and”), disjunction (“or”), and negation (“not”), to link propositions into increasingly complicated networks. From these simple propositions, they derived the full complexity of modern mathematics". Amanda Gefter, nautilus.