Jack D. Cowan

Timeline

1. 1933–1955

   Physics at Edinburgh

   Jack David Cowan is born in Leeds, England, in 1933, and moves with his family to Edinburgh at age six. He studies physics at the University of Edinburgh, graduates in 1955, and works on early computing projects at Ferranti Labs in Edinburgh.

2. 1962–1967

   MIT and an Imperial PhD

   In 1962, as a graduate student in electrical engineering at MIT, he asks Warren McCulloch, Walter Pitts and Norbert Wiener which mathematics best suits the study of the brain, and he follows Pitts's advice toward differential equations. He earns a PhD at Imperial College London in 1967 with the dissertation A Mathematical Theory of Central Nervous Activity, advised by Dennis Gabor.

3. 1967

   Mathematical biology chair at Chicago

   In 1967, he joins the University of Chicago faculty and succeeds Nicolas Rashevsky as chair of the Committee on Mathematical Biology.

4. 1972–1977

   The Wilson–Cowan equations

   In 1972, he and postdoctoral fellow Hugh Wilson formulate the Wilson–Cowan equations for interacting populations of excitatory and inhibitory neurons, which become a mainstay of neural network research. He and his students are the first to apply dynamical systems and bifurcation theory to neural field equations. In 1977, he is a visiting researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen and receives the Humboldt Senior Scientist Award.

5. 1993

   General chair of NIPS*93

   He serves as general chair of NIPS*93, the seventh Neural Information Processing Systems meeting, held in Denver in 1993. The conference brings together neuroscientists, engineers, computer scientists, cognitive scientists, physicists and mathematicians interested in neural processing and computation.

6. 2008

   Phase transitions in the brain

   In February 2008, as a professor in mathematics and neurology at Chicago, he organizes a session on mathematics and the brain at the AAAS annual meeting in Boston and argues that brain activity follows the physics of phase transitions. With former graduate student Michael Buice, he shows an analogy between chemical reaction networks and neural networks.

7. 2014–2016

   A Festschrift at Banff

   In July 2014, the Banff International Research Station hosts the workshop Stochastic Network Models of Neocortex in his honor, on the occasion of his 81st birthday. A Festschrift special issue of The Journal of Mathematical Neuroscience follows in 2016.

8. 2022–2025

   Professor emeritus at Chicago

   He becomes professor emeritus at the University of Chicago in 2022. He dies in 2025 at the age of 91, and colleagues announce his death to the mathematical neuroscience community in July 2025.