Amit started his scientific activity in particle physics, obtaining a PhD from Brandeis University in 1963, under Eugene P. Gross. He was then active, in the 1970s, in statistical mechanics. In the 1980s he moved on to a more interdisciplinary research including neurosciences. He was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in 1982-83. He was professor at The Racah Institute of Physics of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and professor of neural networks in the Department of Physics of the Sapienza University of Rome and was among the founders of the modern theory of neural networks.