From Nautilus

The Man Who Tried to Redeem the World with Logic

The story of Walter Pitts, who ran away from home at 15, corrected Bertrand Russell by post, and with Warren McCulloch built the first mathematical model of a neuron — the ancestor of every neural network running today. Gefter tells it as a tragedy: the experiment that showed the brain was messier than logic broke the man who had bet his life on logic.