Get in touch

Please!

If you want to be notified about the memorial for Jerry. Please send your contact information (name, address or email, and perhaps a note about how you knew him) to me at:

dlettvin@gmail.com

David

Don't make me beg ...

Send me Jerry stories and photos!

Please give me explicit permission to put them on the blog within the email. Then I won't have to check back with you to make sure.

The Boston Globe's obituary

Find it here:

Globe Obit

Video of Lettvin vs, Leary

John Moore has been kind enough to put up the full video of the debate

LSD: Lettvin vs. Leary

More Data, More Noise

You can find a PDF of the book made for the celebration of Jerry's 60th birthday here:

More Data, More Noise

Manteno State Hospital

Jerry spent about three and a half years as a Senior Psychiatrist at Manteno State Hospital. The hospital is no longer in operation, but some folks have put together an historical blog. 

Yes, I know they misspelled his name. I sent them a correction.

Let me introduce myself

My name is David Lettvin, I am Jerry and Maggie's first-born. Only those who worked with Jerry back in the 50s and 60s will likely have met me. My talents were in fields other than science so I wasn't around the lab much after that.

A Jerry Omnibus

Jerry's biography on Wikipedia (written by Jonathan) is here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerome_Lettvin

Jonathan's pages on Jerry are here:

http://jerome.lettvin.info/

Jerry's autobiography (from "The History of Neuroscience in Autobiography) is here:
http://www.sfn.org/skins/main/pdf/history_of_neuroscience/hon_vol_2/c8.pdf

Lincoln Stoller interviews Jerry and his wife Maggie (WGBH exercise guru) here:
http://www.tengerresearch.com/learn/interviews/jeromelettvin_text.htm

A copy of his groundbreaking paper "What the frog's eye tells the frog's brain" is here:
http://jerome.lettvin.info/lettvin/Jerome/WhatTheFrogsEyeTellsTheFrogsBrain.pdf

A list of his scientific publications is here:
http://sites.google.com/site/lettvingroup/Home/biographies/jerry-lettvin/publications

His published translations of German poetry are here:
http://sites.google.com/site/lettvingroup/Home/biographies/jerry-lettvin/creative-writing/gallows-songs

An audio recording of his famous debate with Timothy Leary is here:
http://wn.com/Jerome_Lettvin

His MIT obituary is here:
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/obit-lettvin-0429.html

A remembrance of him by Marc Abrahams of the "Ig Nobel" awards and the Annals of Improbable Research is here:
http://improbable.com/2011/04/26/jerry-lettvin-is-gone/

To find out about a memorial for Jerry contact Gill Pratt at:

gill@alum.mit.edu

To post an article here contact David Lettvin at:

dlettvin@gmail.com

Obits etc.

The Boston Globe will be publishing an article on Jerry in the Metro section sometime this week.

No word yet on the NYT or the Chicago Tribune, both of which were contacted,

The MIT News has an obituary here:
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/obit-lettvin-0429.html

Note that there is a link at the end of the article to contact Gil Pratt regarding plans for a memorial.

Brains, Minds & Machines

I have heard that Jerry was honored during the opening ceremonies of Brains, Minds & Machines, an MIT +150 symposium at MIT's Kresge Auditorium.

http://mit150.mit.edu/symposia/brains-minds-machines

A very basic obituary

Portions of the following were adapted from Jonathan's Wikipedia article with edits and corrections by Maggie 

Professor Jerome Ysroael Lettvin died Saturday April 23 at his home in Hingham, MA after a long illness.

"Jerry", as he insisted on being called, was a cognitive scientist and professor Emeritus of Electrical and Bioengineering and Communications Physiology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he taught and maintained a research laboratory. 

His best known work is the 1959 paper "What the frog's eye tells the frog's brain", one of the most cited papers in the Science Citation Index and what many consider to be the seminal paper for the science of Bionics. Although several co-authors were listed, the paper's literate clarity is a hallmark of Jerry's style. 

Born February 23, 1920 in Chicago to Solomon and Fanny Lettvin, he was eldest of four children (one brother was the pianist and teacher Theodore Lettvin). Jerry claimed to have had early jobs as a pocket pusher in a laundry, a spear carrier for an opera company, and a radical speechwriter. 

He trained as a neurologist and M.D. at the University of Illinois receiving  a B.S. and an M.D. (in 1943) and, was an intern at Boston City Hospital. The U.S. Army provided Jerry with further training as a psychiatrist, and he was an Army doctor during the Battle of the Bulge.

After the war, spent a year as a neurologist at the University of Rochester, then a further 3 1/2 years as a psychiatrist at Manteno State Hospital in Illinois.

Jerry moved to Boston to begin research in neurology and nervous systems at MIT, working with Walter Pitts, Warren McCulloch, and Humberto Maturana under Norbert Wiener, where his multidisciplinary approach to theory, research and teaching (he taught classes in Electronics Engineering, History of Science, Biology, and Physiology) and his thoughtful and humorous approach made his cluster of offices and labs on the ground floor of Building 20 a magnet for talented and ingenious graduate students.

Jerry was a voracious reader, not just of scientific materials, but all types of literature and essays. His main office at MIT was crammed with bookshelves stacked two and three rows deep with books of all types. Many of these were well overdue from the MIT library. He claimed that the reason he never returned them is that the librarians would send the students who wanted those books to his office where he would interview them as potential assistants and collaborators.

His articles and papers were published in scientific and literary journals. He wrote many published articles on subjects varying from neurology and physiology to philosophy and politics to mythology and poetry. His translations of Christian Morgenstern's poems from German retain the playfulness of the originals.

Jerry was a firm advocate of individual rights appearing as an expert witness in trials in the U.S. and in Israel. During the antiwar demonstrations of the 1960s he helped negotiate agreements between police and protesters, and took part in the 1968 student takeover of the MIT Student Center in support of an AWOL soldier. 

In 1967, Timothy Leary was to debate an MIT professor about the merits of LSD. That professor became unavailable on the day of the event. The organizers finally came to Jerry's lab in desperation and asked him to do it. In his shirtsleeves, fresh from the middle of an experiment, he debated Leary extemporaneously. At one point he challenged Leary (a licensed psychologist) to diagnose the symptoms of temporal lobe epilepsy. Leary's response was that those were the signs of an enlightened mystic to which Jerry responded with a resounding "bullshit," which expletive was so perfect a response that it was usually not edited out in spite of the prevailing broadcast laws at the time. 

He was a regular invitee at the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony as "the world's smartest man" to debate extemporaneously against groups of people on their own subjects of expertise.

Professor Lettvin is survived by his wife Margaret (Maggie of the WGBH show Maggie and the Beautiful Machine), three children, six grandchildren and six great grandchildren.

Jerry the Actor

Of course he was always on, but at one point was a television actor.

Taking on a a role that was not far from his own personality, he played a crazily seductive scientist and demonstrator who was tempting people to sniff ether.

The show was an early Nova episode called "Strange Sleep" about anaesthesia. It aired for the first time on PBS on April 4, 1974, and in 1975 won the Red Ribbon at the American Film Festival.

Unfortunately, there are no links to view the episode over the Web, but I will keep looking and post a link here if I find one or if I find a place to buy it from.

Jerry's Papers

Jerry was a prolific writer, writing many drafts of each article, paper, or poem.

Last year, we sent nearly 100 bankers boxes of manuscript, typescript, notes, etc. to the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia where his documents share a vault with those of his colleague Warren McCulloch as well as fellow radicals Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson.

The APS archivists are engaged in the huge task of cataloging the material after which it will be listed among their acquisitions.

A choice of venue

Jonathan has a collection of photos on his wiki. (See the comments to the first post.) I will be publishing photos one at a time here with further comments and an attempt at identification.

Lettvinalia

A partial list of Jerry's papers and publications may be found here:
http://sites.google.com/site/lettvingroup/Home/biographies/jerry-lettvin/publications

In addition to Jonathan's wiki page of the Morgenstern translations, there is another page at:
http://sites.google.com/site/lettvingroup/Home/biographies/jerry-lettvin/creative-writing/gallows-songs

The background image

The background image of this site is the Northern Leopard Frog (Rana Pipiens) which was the animal which was the basis of most of Jerry's research. The photo is from a University of Washington website.

More Data More Noise

That was the title of a book assembled for one of my father's many birthdays. It contains many remembrances and stories which I may repost here as I get permissions.