David Everett Rumelhart (June 12, 1942 – March 13, 2011) was an American psychologist who made many contributions to the formal analysis of

human cognition Cognition refers to "the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses". It encompasses all aspects of Intellect, intellectual functions and processes such as: perception, attentio ...

, working primarily within the frameworks of

mathematical psychology Mathematical psychology is an approach to psychological research that is based on mathematical modeling of perceptual, thought, cognitive and motor processes, and on the establishment of law-like rules that relate quantifiable stimulus character ...

symbolic artificial intelligence In artificial intelligence, symbolic artificial intelligence is the term for the collection of all methods in artificial intelligence research that are based on high-level symbolic (human-readable) representations of problems, logic and search. S ...

, and parallel distributed processing. He also admired formal linguistic approaches to cognition, and explored the possibility of formulating a formal grammar to capture the structure of stories.

Biography

Rumelhart was born in

Mitchell, South Dakota Mitchell is a city in and the county seat of Davison County, South Dakota, United States. The population was 15,660 at the 2020 census making it the sixth most populous city in South Dakota. Mitchell is the principal city of the Mitchell Micr ...

on June 12, 1942. His parents were Everett Leroy and Thelma Theora (Ballard) Rumelhart. He began his college education at the University of South Dakota, receiving a B.A. in

psychology Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. Psychology includes the study of conscious and unconscious phenomena, including feelings and thoughts. It is an academic discipline of immense scope, crossing the boundaries betwe ...

and

mathematics Mathematics is an area of knowledge that includes the topics of numbers, formulas and related structures, shapes and the spaces in which they are contained, and quantities and their changes. These topics are represented in modern mathematics ...

in 1963. He studied mathematical psychology at

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

, receiving his Ph.D. in 1967. From 1967 to 1987 he served on the faculty of the Department of Psychology at the

University of California, San Diego The University of California, San Diego (UC San Diego or colloquially, UCSD) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in San Diego, California. Established in 1960 near the pre-existing Scripps Insti ...

. In 1987 he moved to

, serving as Professor there until 1998. Rumelhart was elected to the

National Academy of Sciences The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the Nati ...

in 1991 and received many prizes, including a MacArthur Fellowship in July 1987, the Warren Medal of the

Society of Experimental Psychologists The Society of Experimental Psychologists (SEP), originally called the Society of Experimentalists, is an academic society for experimental psychologists. It was founded by Edward Bradford Titchener in 1904 to be an ongoing workshop in which memb ...

, and the APA Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award. Rumelhart, co-recipient with James McClelland, won the 2002

University of Louisville The University of Louisville (UofL) is a public research university in Louisville, Kentucky. It is part of the Kentucky state university system. When founded in 1798, it was the first city-owned public university in the United States and one of ...

Grawemeyer Award in Psychology. Rumelhart became disabled by

Pick's disease Frontotemporal dementia (FTD), or frontotemporal degeneration disease, or frontotemporal neurocognitive disorder, encompasses several types of dementia involving the progressive degeneration of frontal and temporal lobes. FTDs broadly present as ...

, a progressive

neurodegenerative disease A neurodegenerative disease is caused by the progressive loss of structure or function of neurons, in the process known as neurodegeneration. Such neuronal damage may ultimately involve cell death. Neurodegenerative diseases include amyotrophic ...

, and at the end of his life lived with his brother in

Ann Arbor, Michigan Ann Arbor is a city in the U.S. state of Michigan and the county seat of Washtenaw County, Michigan, Washtenaw County. The 2020 United States census, 2020 census recorded its population to be 123,851. It is the principal city of the Ann Arbor ...

. He died in

Chelsea, Michigan Chelsea is a city in Washtenaw County in the U.S. state of Michigan. The population was 5,467 at the 2020 census. History The area was first settled as early as 1820 within the Michigan Territory by settler Cyrus Beckwith. It would be organized ...

. He is survived by two sons.

Work

Rumelhart was the first author of a highly cited paper from 1985 (co-authored by Geoffrey Hinton and Ronald J. Williams) that applied the back-propagation algorithm (also known as the reverse mode of automatic differentiation published by

Seppo Linnainmaa Seppo Ilmari Linnainmaa (born 28 September 1945) is a Finnish mathematician and computer scientist. He was born in Pori. In 1974 he obtained the first doctorate ever awarded in computer science at the University of Helsinki. In 1976, he became Assi ...

in 1970) to multi-layer neural networks. This work showed through experiments that such networks can learn useful internal representations of data. The approach has been widely used for basic cognition researches (e.g., memory, visual recognition) and practical applications. This paper, however, does not cite earlier work of the backpropagation method, such as the 1974 dissertation of

Paul Werbos Paul John Werbos (born 1947) is an American social scientist and machine learning pioneer. He is best known for his 1974 dissertation, which first described the process of training artificial neural networks through backpropagation of errors. He ...

. In the same year, Rumelhart also published ''Parallel Distributed Processing: Explorations in the Microstructure of Cognition'' with James McClelland, which described their creation of computer simulations of perceptrons, giving to computer scientists their first testable models of neural processing, and which is now regarded as a central text in the field of cognitive science. Rumelhart's models of

semantic cognition Semantics (from grc, σημαντικός ''sēmantikós'', "significant") is the study of reference, meaning, or truth. The term can be used to refer to subfields of several distinct disciplines, including philosophy, linguistics and comput ...

and specific knowledge in a diversity of learned domains using initially non-hierarchical neuron-like processing units continue to interest scientists in the fields of

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech re ...

anthropology Anthropology is the scientific study of humanity, concerned with human behavior, human biology, cultures, societies, and linguistics, in both the present and past, including past human species. Social anthropology studies patterns of behavi ...

information science Information science (also known as information studies) is an academic field which is primarily concerned with analysis, collection, Categorization, classification, manipulation, storage, information retrieval, retrieval, movement, dissemin ...

, and

decision science Decision theory (or the theory of choice; not to be confused with choice theory) is a branch of applied probability theory concerned with the theory of making decisions based on assigning probabilities to various factors and assigning numerical ...

. In his honor, in 2000 the '' Robert J. Glushko and Pamela Samuelson Foundation'' created the David E. Rumelhart Prize for Contributions to the Theoretical Foundations of Human Cognition. A '' Review of General Psychology'' survey, published in 2002, ranked Rumelhart as the 88th most cited psychologist of the 20th century, tied with

John Garcia John is a common English name and surname: * John (given name) * John (surname) John may also refer to: New Testament Works * Gospel of John, a title often shortened to John * First Epistle of John, often shortened to 1 John * Second E ...

James J. Gibson James Jerome Gibson (; January 27, 1904 – December 11, 1979) was an American psychologist and is considered to be one of the most important contributors to the field of visual perception. Gibson challenged the idea that the nervous system ...

Louis Leon Thurstone Louis Leon Thurstone (29 May 1887 – 29 September 1955) was an American pioneer in the fields of psychometrics and psychophysics. He conceived the approach to measurement known as the law of comparative judgment, and is well known for his cont ...

Margaret Floy Washburn Margaret Floy Washburn (July 25, 1871 – October 29, 1939), leading American psychologist in the early 20th century, was best known for her experimental work in ethology, animal behavior and motor theory development. She was the first woman to ...

, and

Robert S. Woodworth Robert Sessions Woodworth (October 17, 1869 – July 4, 1962) was an American academic psychologist and the creator of the personality test which bears his name. A graduate of Harvard and Columbia, he studied under William James along with othe ...

References

External links

David E. Rumelhart Prize

The PDP++ Software Home Page

{{DEFAULTSORT:Rumelhart, David E. 1942 births 2011 deaths Computational psychologists American cognitive neuroscientists MacArthur Fellows History of artificial intelligence Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences University of South Dakota alumni Stanford University alumni Stanford University Department of Psychology faculty People from Jerauld County, South Dakota Deaths from dementia in Michigan Deaths from Pick's disease Fellows of the Cognitive Science Society People from Mitchell, South Dakota