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Who is Marvin Minsky?

Marvin Minsky is listed on Google Directory as one of the all time top six people in the field of artificial intelligence.

Isaac Asimov once described him as one of only two people he would admit were more intelligent than Asimov was (the other being Carl Sagan).

...Ray Kurzweil has referred to him as his mentor.

A philosopher and scientist, Marvin Lee Minsky was born in New York City on August 9, 1927, where he attended the Fieldston School and the Bronx High School of Science.

He served in the US Navy from 1944 to 1945 and received a BA from Harvard in 1950 and a PhD in mathematics from Princeton in 1954.

In 1959 Marvin Misky and John McCarthy founded what is now known as the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He is currently the Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Sciences, and Professor of electrical engineering and computer science.

Minsky was an adviser on the 1968 Stanley Kubrick classic science fiction movie 2001: A Space Odyssey and is referred to in both the movie and the book. He 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.

Inventor and author, Minsky is universally regarded as one of the world's leading authorities in artificial intelligence who has made fundamental contributions to the fields of robotics and computer-aided learning technologies. Some of his most notable books include The Society of Mind, Perceptrons (which he co-authored with Seymor Papert) and, most recently, The Emotion Machine.