Vernon Mountcastle at Johns Hopkins demonstrated that neurons in the cortex are organized in vertical columns, establishing the cortical column as the basic modular unit of the cortex, a finding now standard in neuroscience textbooks. Separately, in 1957 John Backus developed Fortran at IBM's New York headquarters, pairing a high-level programming language with an optimizing compiler so that mathematical formulas could be translated into efficient machine code.
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The hosts note Fortran built on an earlier machine compiler created by Grace Hopper, but Fortran was the first optimized for how machines are actually used.
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The hosts remark that Fortran code is still in use in scientific computing today.
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1:42:38Vernon Vernon Mount Castle at John's Hopkins University, another John's Hopkins in medicine. Um he demonstrated that neurons are arranged in this vertical fashion and established this sort of modular unit of the cortex which is now you know textbook material for neuroscience. 1957 development of Forran and the first optimizing compiler. Yes. So we had a machine compiler earlier. Yes. By Grace Hopper. This is the first one that's really optimized to use machines in the way that they're used today. Okay. John Bakus developed forran at IBM's headquarters in New York
1:43:18City. Um it was the pairing of a highle language with an optimizing compiler. So now computers can translate mathematical formulas into machine code in a really efficient way. Forran changed the game >> 100%. >> I mean there's still there's still code out there in science that uses forran. It's insane.