Science & invention
David Rumelhart
1942–2011 · cognitive psychologist
Cognitive scientist whose work on parallel distributed processing and backpropagation laid foundations for modern neural networks; he spent his last years in the Ann Arbor area.
- Born
Wessington Springs, South Dakota- Died
Chelsea, Michigan
aged 68- Birth name
- David Everett Rumelhart
- Also known as
- David E. Rumelhart
- Detroit years
- 2000s–2011
- Field
- Science & invention
01 / The Detroit story
The Detroit story
Rumelhart was born in South Dakota in 1942 and made his career at the University of California, San Diego, and Stanford. He built formal models of human cognition, from reading and story understanding to memory, and with James McClelland led the group that produced Parallel Distributed Processing (1986), which revived interest in brain-like networks of simple units. In the same year, with Geoffrey Hinton and Ronald Williams, he published the paper that popularized backpropagation, the learning method at the heart of today's deep learning. He received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1987 and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1991. Stricken by Pick's disease, a progressive brain disorder, he spent his final years living with his brother in Ann Arbor, and he died in nearby Chelsea in 2011. The Rumelhart Prize in cognitive science is named for him.
Highlights
- Parallel Distributed Processing (1986), with James McClelland and the PDP group
- Co-author of the 1986 backpropagation paper with Geoffrey Hinton and Ronald Williams
- MacArthur Fellowship, 1987; National Academy of Sciences, 1991
- The David E. Rumelhart Prize in cognitive science bears his name