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Marvin Minsky

American mathematician and co-founder of artificial intelligence.

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Marvin Minsky

via Wikipedia: Marvin Minsky · see source

Marvin Minsky was an American mathematician and a central figure in artificial intelligence research.[1] On January 24, 2016, at age 88, Minsky passed away in Boston, Massachusetts due to a cerebral hemorrhage.[2]

Life and work

He served in the U.S. Navy from 1944 to 1945 before earning a mathematics degree from Harvard and a Ph.D. from Princeton.[3] He co-founded what is now the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory with John McCarthy.[4] He also invented the confocal microscope in 1957 and the first head-mounted graphical display in 1963.[5] Following a three-year period as a Junior Fellow with the Harvard Society of Fellows, Minsky became a member of the MIT faculty in 1958 and stayed at that institution for the remainder of his professional life.[6]

The SNARC machine, constructed by Minsky in 1951, is frequently regarded as the earliest artificial neural network.[5]

What the cited sources add

A VICE article reports that Minsky proposed his "ultimate machine" design while at Bell Labs in 1952.[7] A tribute on space.com notes that Minsky built the first learning machine based on neural networks.[8] The same source states that Minsky mentored a generation of AI leaders, including Ray Kurzweil.[8] The Japan Prize citation explains that Minsky's 1961 paper "Steps Toward Artificial Intelligence" brought knowledge about AI to many researchers worldwide.[9]

The Guardian obituary adds that Minsky helped Stanley Kubrick with the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey.[10] After the switch was flipped to the "ON" position, a hand came out of the box and moved the switch back to "OFF".[7]

References

  1. Wikipedia, "Marvin Minsky" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: ; Rifkin, Glenn, "Marvin Minsky, Pioneer in Artificial Intelligence, Dies at 88", The New York Times, January 25, 2016 (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
  2. Wikipedia, "Marvin Minsky" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Pearson, "Pioneering computer scientist Marvin Minsky dies at 88", CNN, 26 January 2016; Rifkin, Glenn, "Marvin Minsky, Pioneer in Artificial Intelligence, Dies at 88", The New York Times, January 25, 2016; "Alcor Scientific Advisory Board", Alcor, January 14, 2016; "Official Alcor Statement Concerning Marvin Minsky", Alcor News, January 27, 2016 (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
  3. Wikipedia, "Marvin Minsky" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Rifkin, Glenn, "Marvin Minsky, Pioneer in Artificial Intelligence, Dies at 88", The New York Times, January 25, 2016; Winston, "Marvin L. Minsky (1927–2016)", Nature, 2016, p. 282; Campbell-Kelly, "Marvin Minsky Obituary", The Guardian (TheGuardian.com), February 3, 2016; Swedin, "Science in the Contemporary World: An Encyclopedia", ABC-CLIO, August 10, 2005, p. 188; Rifkin, Glenn, "Marvin Minsky, Pioneer in Artificial Intelligence, Dies at 88", The New York Times, January 25, 2016; Rifkin, Glenn, "Marvin Minsky, Pioneer in Artificial Int en.wikipedia.org
  4. Wikipedia, "Marvin Minsky" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: "Society of Fellows, Listed by Term"; "Marvin Minsky, Ph.D. Biography and Interview", www.achievement.org; Rifkin, Glenn, "Marvin Minsky, Pioneer in Artificial Intelligence, Dies at 88", The New York Times, January 25, 2016; Horgan, "Profile: Marvin L. Minsky: The Mastermind of Artificial Intelligence", Scientific American, November 1993, p. 14–15; Rifkin, "Marvin Minsky, pioneer in artificial intelligence, dies at 88", The Tech, 28 January 2016 (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
  5. Wikipedia, "Marvin Minsky" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: "Brief Academic Biography of Marvin Minsky", Web.media.mit.edu, February 2026; Patil-Takbhate, "Marvin Minsky: The Visionary Behind the Confocal Microscope and the Father of Artificial Intelligence", Cureus, 2024-09-02; Minsky, "Memoir on inventing the confocal scanning microscope", Scanning, 1988, p. 128–138; Patil-Takbhate, "Marvin Minsky: The Visionary Behind the Confocal Microscope and the Father of Artificial Intelligence", Cureus, 2024-09-02; "Why did AI pioneer Marvin Minsky oppose neural networks?", Analytics India Magazine, 2022- en.wikipedia.org
  6. Wikipedia, "Marvin Minsky" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: ; "Google Scholar", scholar.google.com; Winston, "Marvin L. Minsky (1927–2016)", Nature, 2016, p. 282; Mitchell, "Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans", Pelican Books, October 15, 2019, p. 25-26; "Encyclopedia of Artificial Intelligence: The Past, Present, and Future of AI", ABC-CLIO, an imprint of ABC-CLIO, LLC, 2021, p. 105; NAE Staff, "Dr. Marvin L. Minsky / Toshiba Professor of Media Art & Sciences Emeritus / Massachusetts Institute of Technology", NAE.edu, 1989 (we also read that source) en.wikipedia.org
  7. Oberhaus, "Marvin Minsky on Making the 'Most Stupid Machine of All'", VICE, 2016-01-26. facts only, no text reused. vice.com
  8. Kuhn, "Brains, Minds, AI, God: Marvin Minsky Thought Like No One Else (Tribute)", space.com, 2016-03-03. facts only, no text reused. space.com
  9. "The Japan Prize". facts only, no text reused. japanprize.jp
  10. Campbell-Kelly, "Marvin Minsky Obituary", The Guardian (TheGuardian.com), February 3, 2016. facts only, no text reused. theguardian.com

Each numbered sentence above was checked against the source it cites before publication. Sentences citing Wikipedia adapt text from the English Wikipedia article Marvin Minsky (contributors), used under CC BY-SA 4.0; this entry is available under the same licence. Other sources were used for facts only; no text or images are copied from them.

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1. In what year was Marvin Minsky born?

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2. In which place was Marvin Minsky born?

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3. In what year did Marvin Minsky die?

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Sources

Compiled from Wikipedia and the sources listed below. Text from Wikipedia is available under CC BY-SA 4.0; this entry is adapted from it.

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