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19701970s
Seppo Linnainmaa
Finnish mathematician who published reverse-mode automatic differentiation in 1970 — the algorithm the field later called backpropagation.
Organizations
University of Helsinki
Major Achievements
- •Published the modern form of reverse-mode automatic differentiation in his 1970 master's thesis, sixteen years before the connectionist revival made it famous.
- •Gave the method its efficient formulation for accumulating derivatives through arbitrary chains of operations.
- •His work is the mathematical core of the algorithm that trains essentially every modern neural network.
Key Papers
- Taylor Expansion of the Accumulated Rounding Error
Seppo Linnainmaa · BIT Numerical Mathematics · 1976