Taught himself logic and mathematics as a child and became a proficient reader in several languages, including Greek and Latin. Was homeless when he presented Carnap with an annotated copy of his book. Carnap looked around forever trying to find who this kid was. Spent three days in a library at the age of 12, reading Principia Mathematica and sent a letter to Bertrand Russell pointing out what he considered serious problems with the first half of the first volume. Russell invited him to study at Cambridge University at age 12. Described as an eccentric, refusing to allow his name to be made publicly available. Pitts declined, but decided to become a logician anyway. He continued to refuse all offers of advanced degrees or positions of authority at MIT, in part as he would have to sign his name. (Pitts was extremely eccentric and avoided any situation that would require him to sign his name.) At age 15 he left home to study. Regexes were invented when Kleene wrote a paper about one of Pitts' papers, and Ken Thompson pulled the core of the definition from Kleene and generalized it. He was aware of Leibniz's ideas about a universal language or universal computing machine, and he used that and Turing's ideas as the basis for the first ever paper on neural networks. Pitts died in 1969 of bleeding esophageal varices, a condition usually associated with cirrhosis and alcoholism.