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David Everett Rumelhart (June 12, 1942 – March 13, 2011) was an American psychologist who made many contributions to the formal analysis of cognition, working primarily within the frameworks of mathematical psychology, symbolic artificial intelligence, and parallel distributed processing. He also admired formal Linguistics approaches to cognition, and explored the possibility of formulating a formal grammar to capture the structure of stories.
Rumelhart was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1991 and received many prizes, including a MacArthur Fellowship in July 1987, the Warren Medal of the Society of Experimental Psychologists, and the APA Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award. Together with James McClelland, he won the 2002 University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Psychology.
Rumelhart developed backpropagation in spring of 1982 independently.Chapter 12. Rosenfeld, Edward, and James A. Anderson, eds. 2000. Talking Nets: An Oral History of Neural Networks. Reprint edition. The MIT Press. In 1983, he showed it to Terry Sejnowski, who tried it and found it to train much faster than Boltzmann machines (developed in 1983).Chapter 14. Rosenfeld, Edward, and James A. Anderson, eds. 2000. Talking Nets: An Oral History of Neural Networks. Reprint edition. The MIT Press. Geoffrey Hinton however did not accept backpropagation, preferring Boltzmann machines, only accepting backpropagation a year later.Chapter 16. Rosenfeld, Edward, and James A. Anderson, eds. 2000. Talking Nets: An Oral History of Neural Networks. Reprint edition. The MIT Press.
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 , 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.
His 1986 work with McClelland ignited the "past tense debate" during the 1980s revival of neural networks. (1986). 9780262132183, MIT Press. ISBN 9780262132183 The connectionism side debated the symbolic side, represented by Jerry Fodor, Gary Marcus, Zenon Pylyshyn, Steven Pinker, etc. The debate concerned whether neural networks or symbolic programs were adequate models for how English speakers can turn a verb into its past tense.Pinker, Steven. "Four decades of rules and associations, or whatever happened to the past tense debate." Language, the brain, and cognitive development: Papers in honor of Jacques Mehler (2001): 157-179.
Rumelhart's models of semantic cognition 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, anthropology, information science, and decision science.
In his honor, in 2000 the Robert J. Glushko and Pamela Samuelson Foundation created the 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, James J. Gibson, Louis Leon Thurstone, Margaret Floy Washburn, and Robert S. Woodworth.
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