Dr. Stephen Grossberg (‘57): Mathematician, Psychologist, and Lifelong Learner

Name: Dr. Stephen Grossberg

Age: 84

Date of Birth: December 31, 1939

Graduation Year: 1957

Occupation: Wang Professor of Cognitive and Neural Systems; Director at the Center for Adaptive Systems; and Emeritus Professor of Mathematics & Statistics, Psychological & Brain Sciences and Biomedical Engineering at Boston University 

Bio: Dr. Stephen Grossberg (‘57) attended Stuyvesant from 1953 to 1957, when he graduated as valedictorian; during his time at Stuyvesant, he was the Editor-in-Chief of both The Indicator and The Chronicles, the ARISTA secretary, an Art Editor for The Spectator, and the History Club Secretary; he was also a member of Caliper, the business manager forum, and Glee Club, and served on the Executive and Senior Councils. He was a Merit Honor Society finalist and received a gold scholarship certificate, the St. Gaudens Medal for Excellence in Drawing, and awards in math and service. After Stuyvesant, Dr. Grossberg attended Dartmouth College and graduated as valedictorian in 1961 with a B.A. in mathematics and psychology. He went on to graduate from Stanford University in 1964 with an M.S. in mathematics. In 1967, Dr. Grossberg received a PhD in mathematics from Rockefeller University (formerly the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research) as one of its first postdoctoral graduates. He was then hired as Assistant Professor of Applied Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and in 1969, he became Associate Professor of Applied Mathematics there. In 1975, Dr. Grossberg was hired as Professor of Mathematics, Psychology, and Biomedical Engineering at Boston University (BU), a position he holds to this day. Currently, he is also the Director of BU’s Center for Adaptive Systems, which he founded in 1981, and Wang Professor of Cognitive and Neural Systems, a position to which he was first appointed in 1989. 

Q&A:

In your book [Conscious Mind, Resonant Brain: How Each Brain Makes a Mind (2021)], you talked about how your research into how brains make minds began unexpectedly when you took intro to psychology as a freshman at Dartmouth. So regarding your passions and interests at Stuyvesant, was there ever a point when you were doing your extracurriculars that you felt this interest, or were you completely unaware of what you wanted to pursue?

“Well, until I graduated from Stuyvesant, until my first few years in college, everything I was doing in my life was basically learning. Growing up in New York, at least at that time, [you were] not exposed much to nature. [...] Basically, there were buildings and people and pets like cats and dogs. And of all of those things, I was most interested in people. In particular, I was interested in why very well-meaning and intelligent and gifted people often had such tragic lives. [...] So I was very interested in people and our minds, and particularly in learning because that’s what I did every day in my life. But I was also learning not only for the joy of it but [also] for the fear of not being able to escape. I wanted to get out of New York, I wanted to get out of the rat race, I wanted to find meaning in my life. And so there was a critical time in my life, in college, where I was able to make the transition cleanly from learning in part because of fear of failure and rejection, [to] learning out of love, because I loved learning the things I was learning. And a big step in that was when I took introductory psychology as a freshman [at Dartmouth]. [...] For some reason, when I read [parametric] data about learning in introductory psychology, [...] my brain exploded with ideas and, that year, as a freshman, I introduced the modern paradigm of neural networks and computational science [through formulation of adaptive resonance theory], [...] biological models [primarily Additive and Shunting models] of how brains make minds, including the basic equations that people use to this day. [...] So from the time I was a freshman, I was very lucky, because I found my passion in life and I think one of the gifts that life can offer [is] if you’re lucky enough to have a passion that society lets you pursue. Society can be terribly cruel, as we know, but one way I managed is because I always worked so hard that I went way beyond the expectations of my teachers. So I paid my dues in full.”

What’s the biggest or most substantial piece of advice you have for Stuyvesant students? 

“First, it’s a privilege to be able to go to school and learn all day, and I suggest everyone work as hard as they can to learn as much as they can while allowed; it’s society’s gift to you. It might be very competitive, but the difference in many people’s lives between when they’re going to school and learning and then [when they] go out into the workplace and [...] start having to do what [they’re] told, based on results you were supposed to have yesterday, there’s not much learning [and] it’s a lot off the shelf. 

But the second kind of advice I have is qualitatively different: [...] one of the best things that can happen to you is if you can find your passion in life, whatever it is you’re doing. If you can find a kind of work that you’re passionate about and [that] you can get employed to do, then you’re lucky, because to truly accomplish anything you’re gonna have to work very hard. [...] So if you can, find something you’re passionate about that also would be productive. I think there are few things as satisfying as working hard on something you’re passionate about and feeling that it’s made the world a little [bit of a] better place. I’ve always felt—ever since I’ve understood that there’s a universe around us and our planet is a pathetic little rock going around a fifth-rate sun and I’m basically an epsilon that’s here for a fraction of a second in galactic time—[that] you [should] be humble about what you can accomplish and realize we’re all in it together. You should try to do good works for the communities you care about, the people you care about. That’s one of the reasons that I never hit a brick wall, and I’ll be 84 on New Year’s Eve, December 31, [2023], because I found a life passion and I pursued it with gratitude and without trying to take shortcuts. [...] With a shortcut, I would’ve hit a brick wall years ago. 

Also, [...] you need enough breadth of training, interdisciplinary training. The world is changing, we need autonomous adaptive intelligence, we need a broad enough interdisciplinary education about lots of different things, ‘cause you don’t know in 10 years what you’re gonna need to use, and it’s not gonna be that easy to go back to school. You need to know enough that you’ve learned how to learn. Learning to learn, so if you need to read up something in Google or wherever, you have a good enough foundation to quickly grasp the new dimensions, the new problem, and run with it. So you need that broad and deep foundation, and school is a gift to us; it’s a time when we’re allowed to get that foundation. I didn’t have a clue when I was at Stuyvesant what I was gonna do, but then, as I said, the very next fall, my life’s work hit me like a storm, and I never looked back. So, keep working hard and try to pursue things you can be passionate about, especially if you can get work in them.”

Dr. Grossberg’s time at Stuyvesant, though long ago, is nevertheless comparable to that of current Stuyvesant students. To commute to school, for instance, Dr. Grossberg would take the F train from Jackson Heights, Queens, to East 15th Street and 1st Avenue, where the Stuyvesant building was located at the time. His focus was largely on academics, and aside from the standard workload, Dr. Grossberg spent time on special projects for his extracurriculars on weekends and breaks. This academic drive stemmed from and inevitably contributed to Stuyvesant’s trademark competitiveness. 

Dr. Grossberg acknowledges that the competitive culture of Stuyvesant was cutthroat. The consideration of GPA as the main factor in college admissions greatly added to this intense atmosphere. For Dr. Grossberg, the college admissions process was further complicated by the presence of unofficial quotas for Jewish students at top institutions from the 1920s to the 1950s; such quotas were deeply rooted in antisemitism. Dr. Grossberg feels that bright students being forced to compete was the biggest “cruelty of the system.” Because of quotas, only around five percent of the total incoming class at elite universities could be Jewish, so Dr. Grossberg, a self-described “lower-middle-class Jewish boy from Queens” and other Jewish Stuyvesant students had to work twice as hard to maintain top grades. For students aiming to rank among the best in their graduating class and gain admission to top institutions, every percentage point mattered, which “created an atmosphere of fear [about college],” Dr. Grossberg said. 

At the time, Dr. Grossberg wanted to attend an Ivy League school because those were what society deemed prestigious. Retrospectively, however, Dr. Grossberg realizes that schools like City College of New York (CCNY) were equally viable higher education options, noting that his peers who attended City College went on to become highly distinguished in their respective fields. As such, he feels that attending CCNY instead of an Ivy League school wouldn’t have diminished his career prospects at all. “If I hadn’t gone to an Ivy League school and I had heard about CCNY, I could’ve [still] had a very productive career,” Dr. Grossberg said. 

Despite Stuyvesant’s unhealthy competitive atmosphere, the school’s rigorous curriculum prepared Dr. Grossberg well for his undergraduate studies. Even though Dr. Grossberg was accepted to several top colleges, he chose to attend Dartmouth College, which offered him not only the best scholarship but also the opportunity to conduct research through a unique senior-year fellowship program. Though Dr. Grossberg’s Stuyvesant years helped him grow accustomed to academic competition, Dr. Grossberg confesses that when he chose to attend the comparably rigorous Dartmouth, he was looking for a different experience than that which he had at Stuyvesant. “I desperately didn’t want to be competing all the time,” Dr. Grossberg explained.  

All the same, he thrived in the competitive environment and remained driven by competition and his belief in hard work. “I realized that before I left college, I really desperately needed to find a goal in life that had meaning to me, something that I wanted to do, something that I felt could be a life’s career,” Dr. Grossberg reflected. He emphasized that though Dartmouth was rigorous, the golden opportunity to conduct research felt like the best way to explore interesting topics and take the reins of his academic trajectory into his own hands. The seeds for this self-motivation to dabble in his interests were originally sowed in high school. 

Stuyvesant was a place where Dr. Grossberg was able to explore and cultivate skills in not just mathematics and the sciences but also the humanities and arts, subjects that he feels were—ironically—the highlights of his Stuyvesant years. “I always drew and painted since I was a very little boy,” Dr. Grossberg recalled. His love for the visual arts—primarily drawing—led Dr. Grossberg to enter art competitions and even take a selective class at the Museum of Modern Art while at Stuyvesant, and some of his later scientific papers focus on how our minds make and perceive art. However, despite excelling at both the humanities and sciences while at Stuyvesant, Dr. Grossberg still had little idea what he wanted to pursue as a career when he started college.

 It was through a freshman-year introductory psychology course at Dartmouth that he found his true calling: the study of people and learning. Studying psychology ignited a lifelong passion for the human mind and the cumulative nature of learning. In alignment with his burgeoning interests in the human brain, Dr. Grossberg majored in mathematics and psychology. This keen fascination subsequently fueled Dr. Grossberg’s first scientific theory: adaptive resonance theory (ART), which addresses the stability-plasticity dilemma, or humans’ ability to constantly learn new information without forgetting what they already know (this sudden collapse of retained memory is called “catastrophic forgetting”). In 1957 and 1958, Dr. Grossberg first formulated the Additive and Shunting models, which used nonlinear differential equations to describe neural networks and the interactions between long-term memory and short-term memory that Dr. Grossberg observed in neurobiological data. Having had little formal education in neurophysiology, Dr. Grossberg viewed these models through a largely psychological lens at the time. In the decades since, these ideas have become an important cornerstone of computational neuroscience. 

After graduating from Dartmouth, Dr. Grossberg found himself with an array of options for graduate education. He chose to attend Stanford University, where he’d been accepted to three departments, received funding offers, and gotten two fellowships (the NSF Graduate Fellowship and the Woodrow Wilson Graduate Fellowship). Even more of an incentive for Dr. Grossberg was Stanford’s exceptional mathematical psychology program, one of the only such programs in America at the time. However, the kind of work the program was doing turned out to be starkly different from Dr. Grossberg’s research, which was unique in its “real-time neural, dynamical explanations of the evolving behavior of individuals,” Dr. Grossberg said. Dr. Grossberg was trying to mathematically explain human behavior, which cannot be held constant. The connections between human minds and mathematics that fascinated Dr. Grossberg did not hold the same importance to his peers at Stanford. 

After graduating from Stanford with an M.S. in mathematics, Dr. Grossberg began his studies at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research. “At Rockefeller, I became a student of mathematics because math is the queen of the sciences, and I’m a theorist and wanted to further develop the mathematics of mind and brain. My thesis was proving oscillation theorems about the content-addressable memories that my neural networks constituted,” Dr. Grossberg said. (In this case, content-addressable memory refers to the cohesive neural systems relating to stored memories and information, and an oscillation theorem is a type of solution to ordinary differential equations.)

At Rockefeller, Dr. Grossberg continued to develop his neural research on learning and memory, forming new mathematical methods to back his work. One of the biggest challenges he faced in his graduate studies was his professors’ inability to fully comprehend exactly what Dr. Grossberg was researching, primarily because of its novelty: Dr. Grossberg was applying newly conceived mathematical methods to the conceptual realm of human psychology, meshing mathematics and psychology, as he had been doing since his undergraduate years. This proved difficult to support and validate using the standard statistics to which his peers and professors were accustomed. Nonetheless, he successfully synthesized his graduate work into a 450-page thesis, which starts with an extensive study of verbal learning data and subsequently dives into a general learning theory, perception, and other aspects of neurodynamics and neurology. 

After completing his PhD, Dr. Grossberg was hired as an Assistant Professor of Applied Mathematics at MIT. In only a year, Dr. Grossberg published over a dozen mathematical papers and was promoted to Associate Professor, a position that came with the implicit promise of tenure in the future. However, when Dr. Grossberg was supposed to gain tenure a few years later, the U.S. was in the throes of a major stagflation recession (1973-1975) that led many universities to fire untenured professors, including Dr. Grossberg. Still, Dr. Grossberg had achieved a lot in his time at MIT: he wrote dozens of substantial scientific papers, won the Norbert Wiener Medal for Cybernetics (1969), and served as an A.P. Sloan Research Fellow (1969-1971). 

Despite this setback, Dr. Grossberg was promptly hired as a Professor of Mathematics, Psychology, and Biomedical Engineering at BU in 1975. At BU, Dr. Grossberg got an endowed chair—a highly prestigious, typically lifetime position—which he still holds today: the Wang Professorship in Cognitive and Neural Systems. It was at BU that Dr. Grossberg not only continued expanding upon his own already extensive body of research but also found ways to share his knowledge with aspiring neuroscience and neural-modeling students. He founded the Department of Cognitive and Neural Systems, which provided graduate students with training in neural network modeling and was the only department of its kind in the world at the time. 

At BU, Dr. Grossberg continued writing scientific papers (he has authored or co-authored 570 scientific articles since 1967). He still publishes papers regularly—his most recent article, on language-learning in children, was published in the academic journal Frontiers in Psychology on August 3, 2023. Aside from more direct research work, he also founded the journal Neural Networks in 1987, serving as its editor-in-chief from its inception until 2010; in the same vein, he has been an editor at a diverse range of scientific journals, from the International Journal of Cognitive Science to the Journal of Theoretical Neurobiology. Dr. Grossberg has also won myriad awards in recognition of his scientific work, from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’s Neural Networks Pioneer Award (1991) to the INNS Donald O. Hebb Award in Biological Learning (2019). 

In 2021, Dr. Grossberg published a synthesis of much of his life’s work in Conscious Mind, Resonant Brain: How Each Brain Makes a Mind, which received a 2022 Prose Award in Neuroscience from the Association of American Publishers. The book covers everything from brain mechanisms for vision, recognition, and perception, to the wider applications of laminar computing, all while establishing connections among cell biology and physics. It investigates the split between physics and psychology in mind-brain theories, the gap between biological and artificial intelligence, and the sometimes-dichotomous nature of recognition or reality and perception. It also presents a solution in autonomous adaptive intelligence, or the way intelligent agents deal with a constantly-changing world. Dr. Grossberg delves into analogs between the human brain and real-world phenomena, such as the extension of competition-cooperation ideas to economic markets and political systems. Most significantly, Conscious Mind, Resonant Brain thoroughly explains not just the background and basis of Dr. Grossberg’s biggest learning theory, ART, but also its implications in technology and models based on ART’s basic principles. 

Even after decades of academia- and career-related ups and downs and numerous breakthroughs in mathematics and neuroscience, Dr. Grossberg appreciates how Stuyvesant left him so well-equipped to tackle his post-secondary education and research. His ability to develop such complex theories as early as his freshman year of college is partially owed to Stuyvesant, where a rich interdisciplinary curriculum proved worthwhile and rewarding.