David Marr (neuroscientist)

Marr died of leukaemia in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at the age of 35. His findings are collected in the book Vision: A computational investigation into the human representation and processing of visual information, which was finished mainly in the summer of 1979, was published in 1982 after his death and re-issued in 2010 by The MIT Press. This book had a key role in the beginning and rapid growth of computational neuroscience field. He was married to Lucia M. Vaina of Boston University's Department of Biomedical Engineering and Neurology.

Marr is best known for his work on vision, but before he began work on that topic he published three seminal papers proposing computational theories of the cerebellum (in 1969), neocortex (in 1970), and hippocampus (in 1971). Each of those papers presented important new ideas that continue to influence modern theoretical thinking.

He was awarded the Coutts Trotter Scholarship in 1966 and obtained his BA in mathematics the same year. He was elected a Research Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge in 1968. His doctoral dissertation, supervised by Giles Brindley, 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. His interest turned from general brain theory to visual processing. 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. He emphasised the need to avoid general theoretical debates and instead focus on understanding specific problems.

Born in Woodford, Essex, and educated at Rugby School; he was admitted at Trinity College, Cambridge on 1 October 1963 (having been awarded an Open Scholarship and the Lees Knowles Rugby Exhibition).

David Courtenay Marr (19 January 1945 – 17 November 1980) was a British neuroscientist and physiologist. 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.