Graeme Mitchison (26 August 1944 – 13 April 2018) was an English mathematician, scientist, musician, physicist author with wide interests.

Career and contributions

Mitchison had a long association with the

University of Cambridge The University of Cambridge is a Public university, public collegiate university, collegiate research university in Cambridge, England. Founded in 1209, the University of Cambridge is the List of oldest universities in continuous operation, wo ...

. He contributed to mathematics, molecular biology, and quantum computation. One of Mitchison's notable contributions to biology was his work with Nobel laureate

Francis Crick Francis Harry Compton Crick (8 June 1916 – 28 July 2004) was an English molecular biologist, biophysicist, and neuroscientist. He, James Watson, Rosalind Franklin, and Maurice Wilkins played crucial roles in deciphering the Nucleic acid doub ...

, where they presented a theory on

rapid eye movement sleep Rapid eye movement sleep (REM sleep or REMS) is a unique phase of sleep in mammals (including humans) and birds, characterized by random rapid movement of the eyes, accompanied by low muscle tone throughout the body, and the propensity of the s ...

and

neural networks A neural network is a group of interconnected units called neurons that send signals to one another. Neurons can be either Cell (biology), biological cells or signal pathways. While individual neurons are simple, many of them together in a netwo ...

. They hypothesized that dreaming allowed the brain to 'unlearn' certain unnecessary or irrelevant information. In addition to his scientific accomplishments, Mitchison was also a talented pianist and writer. Graeme Mitchison died of aggressive brain cancer on 13 April 2018, at the age of 73.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Mitchison, Graeme 1944 births 2018 deaths