David Everett Rumelhart (June 12, 1942 – March 13, 2011)[1] was an American psychologist who made many contributions to the formal analysis of human cognition, working primarily within the frameworks of mathematical psychology, symbolic artificial intelligence, and parallel distributed processing.

Rumelhart was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1991 and received many prizes, including a MacArthur Fellowship in July 1987, the Warren Medal of the Society of Experimental Psychologists, and the APA Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award.

[2] Rumelhart was the first author of a highly cited paper from 1985[4] (co-authored by Geoffrey Hinton and Ronald J. Williams) that applied the back-propagation algorithm to multi-layer neural networks.

[8] In the same year, Rumelhart also published Parallel Distributed Processing: Explorations in the Microstructure of Cognition[9] with James McClelland, which described their creation of computer simulations of perceptrons, giving to computer scientists their first testable models of neural processing, and which is now regarded as a central text in the field of cognitive science.

The debate concerned whether neural networks or symbolic programs were adequate models for how English speakers can turn a verb into its past tense.

[1][13] A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Rumelhart as the 88th most cited psychologist of the 20th century, tied with John Garcia, James J. Gibson, Louis Leon Thurstone, Margaret Floy Washburn, and Robert S.