[visionlist] Horace Barlow, 1921-2020

[Andrew Watson]

Horace was a great influence on me, both for his scientific creativity and for his joie de vivre. He was, of course, a giant; but also approachable, generous, and fun.

Below I share a few pictures that evoke some of that spirit.

The first picture is from 2001, when Ulker Keesey and I organized the European Conference on Visual Perception in Kusadasi, Turkey. Horace was to give the invited Perception Lecture. Denis Pelli and I arrived a day early, and the first evening we found Horace in the hotel bar. We joined for drinks. Despite having just arrived, and being at that time 79 years old, Horace outlasted both Denis and myself.

The second picture is also from Kusadasi, Horace in repose, with the Aegean sea behind him.

The third is also from Kusadasi, with Ulker Keesey, at an outdoor seafood restaurant.

The last four pictures are from Cambridge, England, in October 1980, at a party hosted by John Robson at the end of my postdoc to send me off to California. I have no memory of what was being discussed, but I can hear Horace’s voice.

-Beau

Andrew Watson 
Chief Vision Scientist
 Apple





> On Jul 7, 2020, at 7:54 PM, Tony Movshon <movshon at nyu.edu> wrote:
> 
> I write to report the sad news that Horace Barlow died on July 5th in Cambridge. He had suffered a severe stroke 10 days earlier, never fully regained consciousness, and died peacefully with his family close by.
> 
> Barlow was a pioneering thinker about the brain and perception. Over seven decades, he made numerous influential discoveries about vision, coding, and neural representation. His work and ideas inspired and shaped much of modern visual science.
> 
> Tony Movshon
> NYU
> 
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