Werner Ernst Reichardt Ph.D: Founder of modern computational visual neurophysiology and anti-Nazi resistance fighter

Werner Ernst Reichardt was born on January 30, 1924 in Berlin and at age 19 was drafted into the Luftwaffe and assigned to an electronic signals secti on laboratory. He became an active member of a resistance group and supplie d radios for the movement in Germany. He emerged from the ashes of the Seco nd World War and dedicated his scientific life to the development of the ne wborn specialty of biological physics. Following graduation from the Techni sche Hochschule Charlottenburg, he did a fellowship at CalTech under Max De lbruck. On returning to Germany he joined the Max Planck Institut and later became Director of the Max Planck Institut fur Biologische Kybernetik in T ubingen, West Germany. Reichardt was one of the founders of the quantitativ e study of visually controlled orientation in animals. His work is very nea rly unique in its close dialectic between elegant non-linear mathematical t heory and quantitative experimental test of their predictions. During the 1 950s Reichardt and his collaborators jointly developed an autocorrelation m odel (i.e. the firing rate of the involved visual neurones is closely corre lated with the features of the pattern stimulating them) of how moving patt erns are perceived by motion detectors in the visual system of the fly. Thi s was the first mathematical description of a biological abstraction proces s. His findings apply to vertebrate vision, including motion detection and figure-ground description in human vision. His Max Planck Institute became a world renowned center for the computational approach to information proce ssing by the nervous system. At his retirement party from the Institute he founded, Reichardt died on the evening of September 11th, 1992.