Gerd Sommerhoff

Gerd Walter Christian Sommerhoff OBE (born 13 February 1915, Wiesbaden, Germany – 28 April 2002, Cambridge, England) was a pioneer of theoretical neuroscience and a noted humanist.

A great-grandson of the German composer Robert Schumann, he was living in England at the onset of the Second World War. As a foreign national, he spent at least two years in an internment camp in Canada before returning to England where he took up a post teaching science at the Dragon School in Oxford. While there, he developed what was really an early form of CBT without computers, using boxes of numbered cards, containing questions, answers, tutorial material, or descriptions of experiments, on a variety of different subjects.

Sommerhoff later became a Research Fellow in Systems Theory at University College, London. In parallel with this position, he taught technology at Sevenoaks School. In 1984, he retired from teaching and moved to Trinity College, Cambridge.

Some of his students were Tim Hunt,Alan Macfarlane, John Paul Morrison, and Richard Veryard.

Gerd Sommerhoff and his twin sister were born in Wiesbaden, Germany, to Elizabeth Ruher and Walter Georg Sommerhoff, a wealthy banker who was born in New York to Elise Schumann, the second child of Robert and Clara Schumann. The Sommerhoff family resided in Haarlem, Netherlands, until the loss of the family fortune in the Wall Street crash and the death of their father "in compromising circumstances". The two younger children moved to Ryde on the Isle of Wight in 1931 with their mother Elizabeth Sommerhoff when she married Major Bernard Francis Anne Vernon-Harcourt, while their elder brother, Walter Hans Sommerhoff, emigrated to Santiago, Chile.

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