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The spiritual successor to Pitts-- Frank Rosenblatt-- has a similarly dramatic end. https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2019/09/professors-perceptr...

It's not in the article, but Rosenblatt died in a freak boating accident before his views were revived in the 80s.

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It's very sad Rosenblatt did not live to see the resurgence of neural networks and his perceptron algorithm. The perceptron algorithm isn't exactly what we use to train neural networks today, but it's similar enough in theory and practice that it still feels very fundamental to understanding machine learning.

And at least in the CogSci space, Rosenblatt's work was instrumental for the PDP (Parallel Distributed Processing) working group in the mid eighties that led to backpropogation methods.

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