David Marr

Who was David Marr?

David Courtnay Marr was a British neuroscientist and psychologist. Marr integrated results from psychology, artificial intelligence, and neurophysiology into new models of visual processing. His work was very influential in Computational neuroscience and led to a resurgence of interest in the discipline.

Born in Woodford, Essex, and educated at Rugby School; he was admitted at Trinity College, Cambridge on 1 October 1963. He was awarded the Coutts Trotter Scholarship in 1966 and obtained his BA in mathematics the same year and got his PhD in physiology under Giles Brindley in 1972. His interest turned from general brain theory to visual processing. His doctoral dissertation was submitted in 1969 and described his model of the function of the cerebellum based mainly on anatomical and physiological data garnered from a book by J.C. Eccles. Subsequently he worked at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he took on a faculty appointment in the Department of Psychology in 1977 and was subsequently made a tenured full professor in 1980. Marr proposed that understanding the brain requires an understanding of the problems it faces and the solutions it finds.