Daniel Amit (1938-2007)

摘要

Daniel Amit, pioneer of computational neuroscience, and founding editor of Network, passed away in Jerusalem on November 4, 2007. Daniel Amit was born in Poland in 1938, but soon afterwards moved with his family to the Palestine British Mandate, where he grew up. After a PhD in physics in Brandeis University, Daniel joined the faculty at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. During his early years, Daniel worked on various topics in theoretical physics and became one of the leading researchers on field theory and the study of the renormalization group. His book 'Field Theory, the Renormalization Group and Critical Phenomena' is still one of the classic books on these topics. At the beginning of the 1980s, Daniel, like a significant group of other physicists at that time, was attracted to the study of neural networks after John Hopfield published his landmark 1982 paper (Hopfield 1982). This would be the starting point of a long quest for the understanding of the mechanisms of memory, that would keep him busy for the last 25 years of his life.