Caianiello

[Jack Cowan]

I was very sorry to hear of the death of Eduardo Caianiello. 


Eduardo was one of the early works in neural networks. I met him  
first in 1959 at MIT when he visited the Communications Biophysics  
Group, of which I was then a graduate student member. It was  
Caianiello who first tried to study discrete state continuous-time  
models of spiking neurons in networks with modifiable couplings. His  
1961 paper in the Journal of Theoretical Biology was an important  
early contribution to the field. 


Of course Caianiello did a lot more than neural networks: he was a  
top notch theoretical physicist who made a number of important  
contributions to quantum field theory. 


When I first visited him in 1964 he was running the Institute of  
Theoretical Physics in Naples. He later set up the Laboratory for  
Cybernetics, and ran numerous very stimulating summer schools in  
Southern Italy on Physics, Cybernetics and Automata Theory, and on  
Neural Networks. He therefore was very influential in keeping alive  
work on Neural Networks, not just in Italy, but in Europe, North  
America, and also in Japan, where his work was very well received.

His passing breaks yet another link with the early generation of  
workers in Neural Networks, and he will be missed, but not forgotten.

Jack Cowan