Marvin Minsky, a founding father of the field of artificial intelligence and an innovative explorer of the mysteries of the human mind during his long tenure at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, died Sunday in Boston. He was 88.
He was a professor emeritus at MIT’s Media Lab.
Minsky devoted his professional life to the astonishing hypothesis that engineers could someday create an intelligent machine. He flourished as a professor and mentor even as the field of A.I. endured discouraging results and eruptions of pessimism.
He lived long enough to see A.I. ambitions flourishing anew, with attendant concerns about killer robots and rogue computers.
Along with fellow A.I. pioneer John McCarthy, he founded the artificial intelligence lab at MIT in 1959.
Marvin Lee Minsky was born in New York City on Aug. 9, 1927. He earned his bachelor’s degree in mathematics at Harvard University in 1950 and a doctorate in mathematics at Princeton in 1954.
Minsky married the former Gloria Rudisch in 1952. Their home became the haunt of science-fiction writers, including their friend Isaac Asimov. Richard Feynman, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, would play the bongos at their parties.
