Schmidhuber's 2014 'Deep Learning' survey is the identifiable, narrow channel that carried Linnainmaa's backpropagation priority into mainstream ML citation practice

schmidhuberlinnainmaabackpropagationpriority-disputehistoriographycitation-analysisdeep-learning-history

Among Linnainmaa's citers, Jürgen Schmidhuber's widely-read "Deep Learning in Neural Networks: An Overview" (arXiv:1404.7828, also in Neural Networks, 2015) states, in its section on the development of backpropagation: "Explicit, efficient error backpropagation (BP) in arbitrary, discrete, possibly sparsely connected, NN-like networks apparently was first described in a 1970 master's thesis (Linnainmaa, 1970, 1976), albeit without reference to NNs." This survey — with Schmidhuber's companion historiographical pieces found in the same citing list ("My First Deep Learning System of 1991 + Deep Learning Timeline 1962-2013") — is the identifiable textual vehicle carrying Linnainmaa's name into the ML literature's self-understanding, distinct from the generic AD citations that make up the bulk of the post-2010 count (claim-linnainmaa-post-2010-citers-mostly-generic-ad-not-priority-historiography).

This sharpens the either/or that question-linnainmaa-citation-growth-vs-nguyen-eger-joint-test poses rather than resolving it one way. The raw volume of post-2010 citations is explained by generic field growth in applied AD; but the specific fact that ML researchers know Linnainmaa's name at all — where the other independent AD-reversal precursors Griewank names (Ostrowski, Hachtel et al.) remain obscure, see claim-linnainmaa-priority-not-paternity — tracks a narrow historiographical channel centered on one author, not a general citation-amnesia reversal. Both can hold at once: field growth explains the citations, the priority dispute explains the name recognition. This note rests on Schmidhuber alone, the vault's most-caveated witness (his claims circulate into tertiary sources that then read as independent); the "this is the channel" reading is an inference from the citer list, not Schmidhuber's own assertion, and stays single-witness at seedling until corroborated.