Jack Cowan

Thank you for that Charles H. Martin, PhD. I am lucky to have collaborated with Jack Cowan at Bios Group in the 1990s, where he regaled us with how he had actually worked and became friends with McCulloch and Pitts! He even lived with McCulloch for a while at some point in the early 1960s. His 1963 book (when he was still a grad student) with Shmuel Winograd "Reliable computation in the presence of noise" is actually a precursor in many ways of things to come.

Jack is a central character in "6 degrees" way: he did not do his PhD at MIT on the advice of Claude Shannon (who had failed the qualifying exam on heavy electrical currents). He was friends with Marvin Minsky and recruited Seymour Papert to join the group -we know how that led to the (in)famous perceptron paper. He completed his PhD at Imperial with Dennis Gabor and was then recruited as a professor at the University of Chicago by Dick Lewontin and Ernst Mayr... while still a grad student! He recruited Stuart Kauffman and Art Winfree. In addition to Bart Ermentrout, Trevor Mundel was one of his PhD students.

Jack is still active and publishing.

Read more from a nice interview he had with Phil HUSBANDS (link in the comments), I extracted one sentence:

" (1962) I remember sitting in the office I shared with McCulloch and having the idea that there is an analogy between the Lotka-Volterra dynamics of predator-prey interactions in populations and excitatory and inhibitory neuron interactions in neural networks, and that set me going for the rest of my career."