Background
A 1946 graduate of the Bronx High School of Science, Rosenblatt was a colorful character at Cornell in the early 1960s. A handsome bachelor, he drove a classic MGA sports car and was often seen with his cat named Tobermory. He enjoyed mixing with undergraduates, and for several years taught an interdisciplinary undergraduate honors course entitled "Theory of Brain Mechanisms" that drew students equally from Cornell's Engineering and Liberal Arts colleges.
This course was a melange of ideas drawn from a huge variety of sources: results from experimental brain surgery on epileptic patients while conscious, experiments on measuring the activity of individual neurons in the visual cortex of cats, studies of loss of particular kinds of mental function as a result of trauma to specific areas of the brain, and various analog and digital electronic circuits that modeled various details of neuronal behavior (i.e. the perceptron itself, as a machine).
Read more about this topic: Frank Rosenblatt
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