Horace B Barlow
1921-2020
The Society has learnt with great regret of the death of Honorary Member Professor Horace Barlow FRS on 5 July 2020 at the age of 98. A great-grandson of Charles Darwin, he was educated at Cambridge and Harvard before returning to Cambridge in 1946 to work with Edgar Adrian. There are very few areas of sensory and computational neuroscience which Barlow’s influence has not touched, including experimental and theoretical work on visual processing in the retina, the statistics of natural scenes, and the nature of visual codes. He moved to the USA where he became Professor of Physiological Optics and Physiology at UC Berkeley, then returned to Cambridge in 1974 as a Royal Society Research Professor. A Member of the Society from 1952, he served on the Editorial Board of The Journal between 1973 and 1980. The recipient of numerous prestigious prizes, Horace Barlow was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1969 and awarded its Royal Medal in 1993.