Table 1.

Milestones in the development of activity equations

1943	McCulloch and Pitts	Neural networks as computational units; foundation of neural networks
1948	Shimbel and Rapoport	Statistical approach to theory of central nervous system
1956	Beurle	First neural field theory of purely excitatory neurons
1963	Griffith	Role of inhibition in stabilizing neural activity
1963,1965	Griffith	Reaction-diffusion neural field theory
1966–	Grossberg	Continuous models of associative memory and pattern recognition
1972	Wilson and Cowan	Mean field theory of coarse-grained neural activity with excitation and inhibition
1973	Wilson and Cowan	Wilson–Cowan equations with spatial dependence
1975	Feldman and Cowan	Wilson–Cowan equations can be derived from microscopic activity under quasistationarity
1977	Amari	Neural field theory with local excitation and lateral inhibition
1983	Cohen and Grossberg	Lyapunov function for general class of continuous activity equations
1995–	Gerstner	Spike-response formalism