Bernstein members involved: Ad Aertsen, Sonja Grün

This book brings together a selection of papers by George Gerstein, representing his long-term endeavor of making neuroscience into a more rigorous science inspired by physics, where he had his roots. George Gerstein was many years ahead of the field, consistently striving for quantitative analyses, mechanistic models, and conceptual clarity. In doing so, he pioneered Computational Neuroscience, many years before the term itself was born. The overarching goal of George Gerstein’s research was to understand the functional organization of neuronal networks in the brain.
The editors of the book have compiled a selection of George Gerstein’s many seminal contributions to neuroscience – be they experimental, theoretical or computational – into a single, comprehensive volume. The aim is to provide readers with a fresh introduction of these various concepts in the original literature. The volume is organized in a series of chapters by subject, ordered in time, each one containing one or more of George Gerstein’s papers. Several of George Gerstein’s former students and collaborators kindly contributed an Introduction to these various Chapters, intending to put the reprinted papers in their historical and present context, and to add the personal touch of their involvement in generating these papers. Thereby, each of these Chapters introduces one (or more) of George Gerstein’s seminal contributions to the Neurosciences, be it in the domain of neuron and network modeling or in the area of neuronal data analysis techniques.
As the Editors write in their Preface: “We hope that, taken together, these various Chapters and their Introductions will help the reader appreciate how much our current thinking on brain function owes to George Gerstein’s research and the insights gained from it. George was not only an innovative thinker in theory, experiment and analysis methodology, he also inspired by his mode of thinking science. Thus, in a way, this book is both a product of this inspiration and a tribute to it.”