David Rumelhart

David E. Rumelhart has made many contributions to the formal analysis of human cognition, working primarily within the frameworks of mathematical psychology, symbolic artificial intelligence, 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.

In 1986, he published Parallel distributed processing: Explorations in the microstructure of cognition with James McClelland, which some still regard as a bible for cognitive scientists.

He obtained his undergraduate education at the University of South Dakota, receiving a B.A. in psychology and mathematics in 1963. He studied mathematical psychology at Stanford University, 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. In 1987 he moved to Stanford University, serving as Professor there until 1998. He has become disabled by Pick's disease, a progressive neurodegenerative disease, and now lives with his brother in Ann Arbor, Michigan.