Marvin Minsky

Marvin Minsky was a pioneering professor in Computer Science at MIT - Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He earned his B.A. in mathematics from Harvard University in 1950 and his Ph.D. in mathematics from Princeton University in 1954, where in 1951 he built the SNARC, the first neural network simulator. Following service in the U.S. Navy during World War II and a Junior Fellowship at the Harvard Society of Fellows from 1954 to 1957, Minsky worked as a staff member at MIT Lincoln Laboratory from 1957 to 1958. He joined the MIT faculty in 1958 as an assistant professor of mathematics and founded the MIT Artificial Intelligence Project in 1959, which became the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory; he co-directed it until 1974. Promoted to professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in 1974, he held the Donner Professorship of Science from 1974 to 1989 and became the Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Sciences in 1990. A founding member of the MIT Media Lab in 1985, he continued as professor emeritus, teaching courses like Society of Mind and mentoring students.

Minsky's research specializations included artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology, mathematics, computational linguistics, robotics, and optics, particularly imparting commonsense reasoning to machines and modeling human intelligence computationally. In 1956, he invented the first confocal scanning microscope. His seminal works encompass books such as The Society of Mind (1986), proposing intelligence as interactions among diverse agents, and The Emotion Machine (2006), examining emotions, goals, and consciousness through layered mental processes; as well as Perceptrons (1969, with Seymour Papert), analyzing limitations of early neural networks, "A Framework for Representing Knowledge" (1975), introducing frames for cognition, "Steps Toward Artificial Intelligence" (1961), and "Matter, Mind, and Models" (1968). Minsky received major awards including the A.M. Turing Award (1969), MIT James R. Killian Jr. Faculty Achievement Award (1989), Japan Prize (1990), IJCAI Research Excellence Award (1991), Rank Prize (1995), R.W. Wood Prize (2001), Benjamin Franklin Medal (2001), Dan David Prize (2014), and BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Lifetime Achievement Award (2014). His foundational contributions co-defined artificial intelligence, inspired global research, and profoundly impacted Computer Science. Marvin Minsky died on January 24, 2016.

Professional Email: minsky@media.mit.edu