English: With about 100 billion processing elements (neurons) with 1 quadrillion pairwise connections (synapses) between them, the human brain is arguably the most "meaningfully" complex structure on Earth. It is obviously an information processor, that performs a large variety of very complex signal processing tasks, with an effectiveness and speed that engineers are often struggling to replicate in machines...While each element is basically an analog electrical circuit (like a transistor), the elements communicate by electric pulses, that apparently can be approximated by a discrete stream of binary digits at discrete time steps. That feature should make the study of the brain attractive to us computer and discrete mathematics fans...Still, understanding the human brain is a formidable challenge. Except for a few peripheral "processors", the structure and "algorithms" of most of the brain are still mostly unknown -- in spite of one century of intense research...This talk will describe a mathematical model for the neuron that, while much simpler than actual neurons, seems to be sufficiently.powerful to simulate the behavior of large networks. We will briefly describe some basic computational tasks that the brain is known to perform, and try to reproduce those functions by "circuits" built with that model neuron.