Marvin Minsky, American cognitive scientist, Died at 88

  Reseacher

Marvin Lee Minsky was born on August 9, 1927, and died on January 24, 2016.

He was an American cognitive scientist.

He was in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), co-founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s AI laboratory, and author of several texts on AI and philosophy.

He was the Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Sciences, and Professor of electrical engineering and computer science before his death.

His inventions include the first head-mounted graphical display, in 1963 and the confocal microscope (1957, a predecessor to today’s widely used confocal laser scanning microscope).

Marvin developed, along with Seymour Papert, the first Logo “turtle”.

He also built, in 1951, the first randomly wired neural network learning machine, SNARC.

Mr. Minsky has written a book called the book Perceptrons (with Seymour Papert), that became the foundational work in the analysis of artificial neural networks.

Marvin Minsky won the Turing Award in 1969, the Japan Prize in 1990, the IJCAI Award for Research Excellence in 1991, and the Benjamin Franklin Medal from the Franklin Institute in 2001.

He was inducted, in 2006, as a Fellow of the Computer History Museum “for co-founding the field of artificial intelligence, creating early neural networks and robots, and developing theories of human and machine cognition.

Marvin Minsky passed away at 88 yrs old.