Walter, W Grey
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.
(1910-1977) American-born neurophysiologist, cyberneticist and author, in the UK from 1915. He was a pioneer, between 1936 and 1956, of the development and use of electroencephalography in the UK; his early popular study, The Living Brain (1953), was influential in its time. In the late 1940s he constructed early Robots known as tortoises, capable of locating a recharging point when their batteries ran low, and of being "taught" through simple conditioned reflexes. His sf novel, Further Outlook (1956; vt The Curve of the Snowflake 1956), affords illustrative, fundamentally Optimistic views of future History up to 2056 CE through the use of a Time Machine. It makes ingenious use of the Koch snowflake curve, a genuine oddity of Mathematics having finite area but an infinite perimeter (not then termed, since the word had yet to be coined, a fractal). [JC/DRL]
Dr William Grey Walter
born Kansas City, Missouri: 19 February 1910
died Clifton, Bristol: 6 May 1977
works
- Further Outlook (London: Gerald Duckworth, 1956) [hb/]
- The Curve of the Snowflake (New York: W W Norton, 1956) [vt of the above: hb/]
nonfiction
- The Living Brain (London: Gerald Duckworth, 1953) [nonfiction: hb/]
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