Marvin Minsky, Ph.D. - Academy of Achievement

<!doctype html> <html lang="en-US" prefix="og: http://ogp.me/ns#"> <head><script type="text/javascript" src="/_static/js/bundle-playback.js?v=HxkREWBo" charset="utf-8"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="/_static/js/wombat.js?v=txqj7nKC" charset="utf-8"></script> <script>window.RufflePlayer=window.RufflePlayer||{};window.RufflePlayer.config={"autoplay":"on","unmuteOverlay":"hidden"};</script> <script type="text/javascript" src="/_static/js/ruffle/ruffle.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript"> __wm.init("https://web.archive.org/web"); __wm.wombat("http://www.achievement.org:80/achiever/marvin-minsky-ph-d","20190115051330","https://web.archive.org/","web","/_static/", "1547529210"); </script> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/_static/css/banner-styles.css?v=S1zqJCYt" /> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/_static/css/iconochive.css?v=3PDvdIFv" />  <meta charset="utf-8"> <meta http-equiv="x-ua-compatible" content="ie=edge"> <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1"> <link rel="apple-touch-icon-precomposed" sizes="57x57" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20190115051330im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/themes/aoa/assets/images/favicon/apple-touch-icon-57x57.png"/> <link rel="apple-touch-icon-precomposed" sizes="114x114" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20190115051330im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/themes/aoa/assets/images/favicon/apple-touch-icon-114x114.png"/> <link rel="apple-touch-icon-precomposed" sizes="72x72" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20190115051330im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/themes/aoa/assets/images/favicon/apple-touch-icon-72x72.png"/> <link rel="apple-touch-icon-precomposed" sizes="144x144" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20190115051330im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/themes/aoa/assets/images/favicon/apple-touch-icon-144x144.png"/> <link rel="apple-touch-icon-precomposed" sizes="60x60" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20190115051330im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/themes/aoa/assets/images/favicon/apple-touch-icon-60x60.png"/> <link rel="apple-touch-icon-precomposed" sizes="120x120" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20190115051330im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/themes/aoa/assets/images/favicon/apple-touch-icon-120x120.png"/> <link rel="apple-touch-icon-precomposed" sizes="76x76" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20190115051330im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/themes/aoa/assets/images/favicon/apple-touch-icon-76x76.png"/> <link rel="apple-touch-icon-precomposed" sizes="152x152" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20190115051330im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/themes/aoa/assets/images/favicon/apple-touch-icon-152x152.png"/> <link rel="icon" type="image/png" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20190115051330im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/themes/aoa/assets/images/favicon/favicon-196x196.png" sizes="196x196"/> <link rel="icon" type="image/png" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20190115051330im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/themes/aoa/assets/images/favicon/favicon-96x96.png" sizes="96x96"/> <link rel="icon" type="image/png" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20190115051330im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/themes/aoa/assets/images/favicon/favicon-32x32.png" sizes="32x32"/> <link rel="icon" type="image/png" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20190115051330im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/themes/aoa/assets/images/favicon/favicon-16x16.png" sizes="16x16"/> <link rel="icon" type="image/png" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20190115051330im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/themes/aoa/assets/images/favicon/favicon-128.png" sizes="128x128"/> <meta name="application-name" content="Academy of Achievement"/> <meta name="msapplication-TileColor" content="#000000"/> <meta name="msapplication-TileImage" content="http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/themes/aoa/assets/images/favicon/mstile-144x144.png"/> <meta name="msapplication-square70x70logo" content="http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/themes/aoa/assets/images/favicon/mstile-70x70.png"/> <meta name="msapplication-square150x150logo" content="http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/themes/aoa/assets/images/favicon/mstile-150x150.png"/> <meta name="msapplication-wide310x150logo" content="http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/themes/aoa/assets/images/favicon/mstile-310x150.png"/> <meta name="msapplication-square310x310logo" content="http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/themes/aoa/assets/images/favicon/mstile-310x310.png"/> <link href="https://web.archive.org/web/20190115051330cs_/https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Source+Sans+Pro:400,600,400italic,600italic,700,700italic" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"> <title>Marvin Minsky, Ph.D. - Academy of Achievement</title>  <meta name="description" content="The revolution in information technology has transformed daily life throughout the world. In developed countries, most people became aware of these changes with the widespread adoption of the personal computer in the 1980s, the Internet in the 1990s, and mobile devices and smartphones in the decades since, but all of these innovations — and more developments yet to come — are the fruit of work carried out by an earlier generation of mathematicians and computer scientists, led by Dr. Marvin Minsky of MIT. Mathematician, inventor, visionary and philosopher, Marvin Minsky built the first neural network device as a graduate student at Princeton. His theoretical writings of the 1950s and early ‘60s became the basis for virtually all subsequent research in artificial intelligence (AI). Founder of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT, he prepared a generation of young computer scientists to create the Internet and today’s digital universe of shared information. In books such as Perceptrons, The Society of Mind and The Emotion Machine — written for the lay reader as well as the scientist — he not only explained the science behind AI, but explored its implications for the future and for our understanding of the nature of thought, feeling, consciousness, and what it means to be human."/> <link rel="canonical" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/marvin-minsky-ph-d/"/> <meta property="og:locale" content="en_US"/> <meta property="og:type" content="article"/> <meta property="og:title" content="Marvin Minsky, Ph.D. - Academy of Achievement"/> <meta property="og:description" content="The revolution in information technology has transformed daily life throughout the world. In developed countries, most people became aware of these changes with the widespread adoption of the personal computer in the 1980s, the Internet in the 1990s, and mobile devices and smartphones in the decades since, but all of these innovations — and more developments yet to come — are the fruit of work carried out by an earlier generation of mathematicians and computer scientists, led by Dr. Marvin Minsky of MIT. Mathematician, inventor, visionary and philosopher, Marvin Minsky built the first neural network device as a graduate student at Princeton. His theoretical writings of the 1950s and early ‘60s became the basis for virtually all subsequent research in artificial intelligence (AI). Founder of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT, he prepared a generation of young computer scientists to create the Internet and today’s digital universe of shared information. In books such as <em>Perceptrons</em>, <em>The Society of Mind</em> and <em>The Emotion Machine</em> — written for the lay reader as well as the scientist — he not only explained the science behind AI, but explored its implications for the future and for our understanding of the nature of thought, feeling, consciousness, and what it means to be human."/> <meta property="og:url" content="https://web.archive.org/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/marvin-minsky-ph-d/"/> <meta property="og:site_name" content="Academy of Achievement"/> <meta property="og:image" content="https://web.archive.org/web/20190115051330im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/minsky3-Feature-Image-2800x1120.jpg"/> <meta property="og:image:width" content="2800"/> <meta property="og:image:height" content="1120"/> <meta name="twitter:card" content="summary"/> <meta name="twitter:description" content="The revolution in information technology has transformed daily life throughout the world. In developed countries, most people became aware of these changes with the widespread adoption of the personal computer in the 1980s, the Internet in the 1990s, and mobile devices and smartphones in the decades since, but all of these innovations — and more developments yet to come — are the fruit of work carried out by an earlier generation of mathematicians and computer scientists, led by Dr. Marvin Minsky of MIT. Mathematician, inventor, visionary and philosopher, Marvin Minsky built the first neural network device as a graduate student at Princeton. His theoretical writings of the 1950s and early ‘60s became the basis for virtually all subsequent research in artificial intelligence (AI). Founder of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT, he prepared a generation of young computer scientists to create the Internet and today’s digital universe of shared information. In books such as <em>Perceptrons</em>, <em>The Society of Mind</em> and <em>The Emotion Machine</em> — written for the lay reader as well as the scientist — he not only explained the science behind AI, but explored its implications for the future and for our understanding of the nature of thought, feeling, consciousness, and what it means to be human."/> <meta name="twitter:title" content="Marvin Minsky, Ph.D. - Academy of Achievement"/> <meta name="twitter:image" content="https://web.archive.org/web/20190115051330im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/minsky3-Feature-Image-2800x1120.jpg"/> <script type="application/ld+json">{"@context":"https:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20190115051330\/http:\/\/schema.org","@type":"WebSite","@id":"#website","url":"https:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20190115051330\/http:\/\/www.achievement.org\/","name":"Academy of Achievement","alternateName":"A museum of living 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/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/minsky3-Feature-Image-2800x1120.jpg [(max-width:992px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2017/03/minsky3-Feature-Image-2800x1120-1400x560.jpg"></div> <div class="display--table"> <div class="display--table-cell"> <figcaption class="feature-area__text ratio-container__text container"> <div class="feature-area__text-inner text-white"> <h2 class="serif-8 feature-area__text-subhead back"><a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever">All achievers</a></h2> <h1 class="serif-1 entry-title feature-area__text-headline">Marvin Minsky, Ph.D.</h1> <h5 class="sans-6 feature-area__blurb">Father of Artificial Intelligence</h5> </div> </figcaption> </div> </div> </figure> </header> </div>  <nav class="in-page-nav row fixedsticky"> <ul class="nav text-xs-center clearfix" role="tablist"> <li class="nav-item col-xs-3"> <a class="nav-link active" data-toggle="tab" href="#biography" role="tab" data-gtm-category="tab" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever Biography">Biography</a> </li> <li class="nav-item col-xs-3"> <a class="nav-link" data-toggle="tab" href="#profile" role="tab" data-gtm-category="tab" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever Profile">Profile</a> </li> <li class="nav-item col-xs-3"> <a class="nav-link" data-toggle="tab" href="#interview" role="tab" data-gtm-category="tab" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever Interview">Interview</a> </li> <li class="nav-item col-xs-3"> <a class="nav-link" data-toggle="tab" href="#gallery" role="tab" data-gtm-category="tab" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever Gallery">Gallery</a> </li> </ul> </nav> <article class="post-37300 achiever type-achiever status-publish has-post-thumbnail hentry careers-computer-scientist careers-inventor careers-mathematician"> <div class="entry-content container clearfix">  <div class="tab-content"> <div class="tab-pane fade in active" id="biography" role="tabpanel"> <section class="achiever--biography"> <div class="row"> <header class="editorial-article__header col-md-8 col-md-offset-2 text-xs-center"> <i class="icon-icon_bio text-brand-primary"></i> <h3 class="serif-3 quote-marks">I started to suggest that people work on artificial intelligence — I invented neural networks and things, and different ideas in psychology — and I noticed people would tell each other, 'Well, that might sound nutty, but he's a good mathematician and he's proved these pretty good theorems.'</h3> </header> </div> <div class="row"> <aside class="col-md-4 sidebar clearfix"> <h2 class="serif-3 p-b-1">A Curious Mind</h2> <div class="col-xs-12 sidebar--chunk p-b-2"> <dt class="serif-7">Date of Birth</dt> <dd class="sans-2"> August 9, 1927 </dd> </div> <div class="col-xs-12 sidebar--chunk p-b-2"> <dt class="serif-7">Date of Death</dt> <dd class="sans-2"> January 20, 2016 </dd> </div> </aside> <article class="editorial-article col-md-8"> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd"> <html><body> <figure id="attachment_38007" style="width: 2280px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><noscript><img class="wp-image-38007 size-full " src="https://web.archive.org/web/20190115051330im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/wp3-combine2-etMarvin-as-Young-Boy-c.jpg"></noscript><img class="wp-image-38007 size-full lazyload" alt="" width="2280" height="1484" data-sizes="(max-width: 2280px) 100vw, 2280px" data-srcset="/web/20190115051330im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/wp3-combine2-etMarvin-as-Young-Boy-c.jpg 2280w, /web/20190115051330im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/wp3-combine2-etMarvin-as-Young-Boy-c-380x247.jpg 380w, /web/20190115051330im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/wp3-combine2-etMarvin-as-Young-Boy-c-760x495.jpg 760w" data-src="https://web.archive.org/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/wp3-combine2-etMarvin-as-Young-Boy-c.jpg"><figcaption class="wp-caption-text">Left: Marvin Minsky as a young boy (c. 1937). Right: Marvin Minksy at Bronx High School of Science. Minsky was born on August 9, 1927 in New York City to Dr. Henry Minsky, chief of ophthalmology at Mount Sinai Hospital, and Fannie Reiser, a social activist and Zionist. He attended the Ethical Culture School in Manhattan, Fieldston School in Riverdale,  then the Bronx High School of Science, and later the Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts.</figcaption></figure><p>Marvin Lee Minsky was born in New York City. His father was an eye surgeon, and an interest in science and medicine was actively encouraged in the Minsky household. Minsky took advantage of his father’s library to read widely in the sciences. He was still a child when he read the works of Freud. He was also a precocious pianist. Music and psychology were to remain lifelong interests. Young Marvin was sent to the Ethical Culture Fieldston School, founded in 1878. In the words of its founder, Felix Adler, “The ideal of the school is not the adaptation of the individual to the existing social environment; it is to develop individuals who are competent to change their environment to greater conformity with moral ideals.” He earned admission to the Bronx High School of Science, a public high school with the greatest number of Nobel Prize winners of any secondary school in the world. He also studied at the Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts before he was called up for military service in World War II.</p> <figure id="attachment_38008" style="width: 2280px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><noscript><img class="size-full wp-image-38008 " src="https://web.archive.org/web/20190115051330im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/wp2-Marvin_Minsky_c_1970-Marvin-Minsky-Block-Blocks-Vision-Robot-MIT-MLLP089.jpg"></noscript><img class="size-full wp-image-38008 lazyload" alt="" width="2280" height="2838" data-sizes="(max-width: 2280px) 100vw, 2280px" data-srcset="/web/20190115051330im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/wp2-Marvin_Minsky_c_1970-Marvin-Minsky-Block-Blocks-Vision-Robot-MIT-MLLP089.jpg 2280w, /web/20190115051330im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/wp2-Marvin_Minsky_c_1970-Marvin-Minsky-Block-Blocks-Vision-Robot-MIT-MLLP089-305x380.jpg 305w, /web/20190115051330im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/wp2-Marvin_Minsky_c_1970-Marvin-Minsky-Block-Blocks-Vision-Robot-MIT-MLLP089-611x760.jpg 611w" data-src="https://web.archive.org/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/wp2-Marvin_Minsky_c_1970-Marvin-Minsky-Block-Blocks-Vision-Robot-MIT-MLLP089.jpg"><figcaption class="wp-caption-text">1968: Marvin Minsky with Block Blocks Vision Robot at MIT. In 1946, he entered Harvard University after returning from service in the U.S. Navy during World War II. After graduating from Harvard in 1950, he attended Princeton University, earning his Ph.D. in mathematics in 1954. In 1958, Minsky joined the faculty of MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. A year later, he co-founded the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.</figcaption></figure><p>Minsky served in the United States Navy from 1944 until the war’s end. Although his scientific curiosity ranged widely, when he entered university, his top two interests were physics and mathematics. He earned an undergraduate degree in physics at Harvard before pursuing doctoral studies in mathematics at Princeton. At the time, there was great excitement among his peers over subjects such as particle physics and molecular genetics. An area that seemed to him equally fascinating, but that attracted less attention at the time, was the question of how the human mind works. Until the 1950s, the working of the brain had been the domain of psychologists and neurologists, but as the first computers appeared in industry and academe, Marvin Minsky undertook the application of mathematics to modeling the functions of the human mind.</p> <figure id="attachment_37583" style="width: 907px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><noscript><img class="wp-image-37583 size-full " src="https://web.archive.org/web/20190115051330im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/perceptrons.jpg"></noscript><img class="wp-image-37583 size-full lazyload" alt="" width="907" height="1360" data-sizes="(max-width: 907px) 100vw, 907px" data-srcset="/web/20190115051330im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/perceptrons.jpg 907w, /web/20190115051330im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/perceptrons-253x380.jpg 253w, /web/20190115051330im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/perceptrons-507x760.jpg 507w" data-src="https://web.archive.org/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/perceptrons.jpg"><figcaption class="wp-caption-text">1969: <em>Perceptrons: An Introduction to Computational Geometry</em> by Marvin Minsky and Seymour A. Papert. Their book was the first systematic study of parallelism in computation and a classical work on threshold automata networks. <em>Perceptrons</em> was the first example of a mathematical analysis carried far enough to show the exact limitations of a class of computing machines that could seriously be considered as models of the human brain.</figcaption></figure><p>Minsky surmised that thought processes expressed as mathematical formulae could be performed by machines, as they are by humans. He was among the first to see that a computer could be more than a glorified adding machine, that machines could learn, reason, offer suggestions and perform any number of tasks that until then had been the sole jurisdiction of the human being. While studying at Princeton, Minsky married Dr. Gloria Rudisch, a pediatrician. Their union produced three children and lasted until his death over 60 years later. The Princeton years were productive for Minsky professionally as well. As a graduate student, he built the first randomly wired neural network learning machine, which he called SNARC. The device emulated the complex web of nerves in the human brain to learn from its own mistakes. He published his research in a 1952 article, “A Neural-Analogue Calculator Based upon a Probability Model of Reinforcement.”  As a doctoral dissertation, he wrote “A Theory of Neural Analog Reinforcement Systems and Its Application to the Brain Model Problem.”</p> <figure id="attachment_37584" style="width: 590px" class="wp-caption alignright"><noscript><img class="size-full wp-image-37584 " src="https://web.archive.org/web/20190115051330im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/societyofthemind.jpg"></noscript><img class="size-full wp-image-37584 lazyload" alt="" width="590" height="761" data-sizes="(max-width: 590px) 100vw, 590px" data-srcset="/web/20190115051330im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/societyofthemind.jpg 590w, /web/20190115051330im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/societyofthemind-295x380.jpg 295w, /web/20190115051330im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/societyofthemind-589x760.jpg 589w" data-src="https://web.archive.org/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/societyofthemind.jpg"><figcaption class="wp-caption-text">In the early 1970s, Minsky and Papert began formulating a theory called The Society of Mind, which combined insights from developmental child psychology and their experience with research on artificial intelligence. The Society of Mind proposes that intelligence is not the product of any singular mechanism, but comes from the managed interaction of a diverse variety of resourceful agents. They argued that such diversity is necessary because different tasks require fundamentally different mechanisms; this transforms psychology from a fruitless quest for a few “basic” principles into a search for mechanisms that a mind could use to manage the interaction of many diverse elements. In 1985, Marvin Minsky published <em>The Society of Mind</em>, a book in which 270 interconnected one-page ideas reflect the structure of the theory itself. Each page either proposes one such mechanism to account for some psychological phenomenon or addresses a problem introduced by a proposed solution on another page. (Simon & Schuster)</figcaption></figure><p>Minsky returned to Harvard in 1954 as a junior member of the prestigious Society of Fellows. As a Junior Fellow, he enjoyed the support to pursue any research subject he chose. Over the next four years, he continued his work, mathematically modeling processes of human thought, laying the groundwork for the field that became known as artificial intelligence (AI). Remarkably, considering the volume and importance of his work in artificial intelligence, he found time for other research projects and inventions.  In 1956, he and a colleague applied for a patent for the confocal scanning microscope, a high-resolution instrument still in wide use in the biological sciences. He continued to publish his major research in articles such as “Heuristic Aspects of the Artificial Intelligence Problem” in 1956. The birth of artificial intelligence as a distinct field of study is sometimes dated to that year, when Minsky and a number of distinguished colleagues met for a formal conference on the topic at Dartmouth College. When his Harvard fellowship ended in 1958, Minsky accepted an appointment at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he would remain on faculty for the rest of his life. Many of his students at MIT, such as Ray Kurzweil, became leading theorists, inventors and entrepreneurs of the digital age. In his first year at MIT, Minsky founded the AI Lab, which quickly became a leading center for artificial Intelligence research. The lab popularized the idea of the digital sharing of information, giving rise to the open-source movement. The lab conducted much of the initial work on the ARPANET, which ultimately evolved into the Internet of today.</p> <figure id="attachment_37580" style="width: 1920px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><noscript><img class="size-full wp-image-37580 " src="https://web.archive.org/web/20190115051330im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/marvin-minsky-bot-D0M7FA.jpg"></noscript><img class="size-full wp-image-37580 lazyload" alt="" width="1920" height="1280" data-sizes="(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px" data-srcset="/web/20190115051330im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/marvin-minsky-bot-D0M7FA.jpg 1920w, /web/20190115051330im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/marvin-minsky-bot-D0M7FA-380x253.jpg 380w, /web/20190115051330im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/marvin-minsky-bot-D0M7FA-760x507.jpg 760w" data-src="https://web.archive.org/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/marvin-minsky-bot-D0M7FA.jpg"><figcaption class="wp-caption-text">1980s: Marvin Minsky, Donner Professor of Science, MIT (1974-1989), wearing an interactive glove in the MIT robotics lab. Professor Minsky’s inventions include SNARC, the first neural network simulator (1951); the confocal scanning microscope (1955); the first head-mounted graphical display (1963); the concept of binary-tree robotic manipulation (1963); the serpentine hydraulic robot arm (1967) (Boston Museum of Science); the “Muse” musical variations synthesizer (1970) (with E. Fredkin); and the first LOGO “turtle” device (1972) (with Papert). (Dan McCoy)</figcaption></figure><p>In 1961, Minsky published an article that has had an almost incalculable impact. “Steps Toward Artificial Intelligence” laid out the path that researchers have followed for over 50 years. Although at first the concepts of artificial intelligence remained the province of a small community of computer scientists, Minsky’s ideas, summarized in his 1967 book, <em>Computation: Finite and Infinite Machines</em>, gradually gained currency in the larger society. His peers recognized his achievement in 1969 with the Turing Award, named for computer pioneer Alan Turing, the highest honor conferred by computer scientists on one of their own. Dr. Minsky had become a legend in the AI community, his name referenced in popular books and films such as <em>2001: A Space Odyssey</em>.</p> <figure id="attachment_37572" style="width: 1280px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><noscript><img class="size-full wp-image-37572 " src="https://web.archive.org/web/20190115051330im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/AP_699678280896.jpg"></noscript><img class="size-full wp-image-37572 lazyload" alt="" width="1280" height="836" data-sizes="(max-width: 1280px) 100vw, 1280px" data-srcset="/web/20190115051330im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/AP_699678280896.jpg 1280w, /web/20190115051330im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/AP_699678280896-380x248.jpg 380w, /web/20190115051330im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/AP_699678280896-760x496.jpg 760w" data-src="https://web.archive.org/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/AP_699678280896.jpg"><figcaption class="wp-caption-text">1987: Dr. Minsky speaks to the audience during a panel discussion on “Artificial Intelligence: Society’s Atlas or Achilles” in Seattle. In 1985, Minsky became a founding member of the MIT Media Lab, where he was named the Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Sciences, and where he continued to teach and mentor. (AP/Robert Kaiser)</figcaption></figure><p>In a 1969 book, <em>Perceptrons: An Introduction to Computational Geometry</em>, Minsky and his colleague Seymour Papert reviewed the history of AI research. Among other observations, they predicted that the future of AI research lay in the development of symbolic systems, rather than further development of the neural network model. The book contributed to a long-running controversy in the AI community.</p> <figure id="attachment_50910" style="width: 2280px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><noscript><img class="size-full wp-image-50910 " src="https://web.archive.org/web/20190115051330im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/wp-Marvin-Minksy-and-Leon-Lederman-2001-Summit-San-Antonio.jpg"></noscript><img class="size-full wp-image-50910 lazyload" alt="" width="2280" height="1531" data-sizes="(max-width: 2280px) 100vw, 2280px" data-srcset="/web/20190115051330im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/wp-Marvin-Minksy-and-Leon-Lederman-2001-Summit-San-Antonio.jpg 2280w, /web/20190115051330im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/wp-Marvin-Minksy-and-Leon-Lederman-2001-Summit-San-Antonio-380x255.jpg 380w, /web/20190115051330im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/wp-Marvin-Minksy-and-Leon-Lederman-2001-Summit-San-Antonio-760x510.jpg 760w" data-src="https://web.archive.org/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/wp-Marvin-Minksy-and-Leon-Lederman-2001-Summit-San-Antonio.jpg"><figcaption class="wp-caption-text">Dr. Marvin Minsky, pioneer of artificial intelligence, and Dr. Leon Lederman, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics, in a conversation between the symposiums at the 2001 American Academy of Achievement in San Antonio, Texas.</figcaption></figure><p>Artificial intelligence advanced rapidly in the 1960s, with generous support from the United States government, particularly the Department of Defense, but progress slowed in the mid-1970s and nearly ground to a halt altogether in the United States when Congress cut off funding in 1974. The following years are remembered as ”the AI Winter” by historians of the field.</p> <figure id="attachment_37587" style="width: 1474px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><noscript><img class="size-full wp-image-37587 " src="https://web.archive.org/web/20190115051330im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/wp-Minsky-Marvin-and-Tracy-Kidder-2001-Summit-San-Antonio-2-of-2.jpg"></noscript><img class="size-full wp-image-37587 lazyload" alt="" width="1474" height="1456" data-sizes="(max-width: 1474px) 100vw, 1474px" data-srcset="/web/20190115051330im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/wp-Minsky-Marvin-and-Tracy-Kidder-2001-Summit-San-Antonio-2-of-2.jpg 1474w, /web/20190115051330im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/wp-Minsky-Marvin-and-Tracy-Kidder-2001-Summit-San-Antonio-2-of-2-380x375.jpg 380w, /web/20190115051330im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/wp-Minsky-Marvin-and-Tracy-Kidder-2001-Summit-San-Antonio-2-of-2-760x751.jpg 760w" data-src="https://web.archive.org/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/wp-Minsky-Marvin-and-Tracy-Kidder-2001-Summit-San-Antonio-2-of-2.jpg"><figcaption class="wp-caption-text">Awards Council member Marvin Minsky presents the Academy’s Golden Plate Award to the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Tracy Kidder during the 2001 Academy of Achievement Summit in San Antonio, Texas. In addition to the Turing Award, Minsky received honors over the years including the Japan Prize; the Royal Society of Medicine’s Rank Prize (for Optoelectronics); the Optical Society of America’s R.W. Wood Prize; MIT’s James R. Killian Jr. Faculty Achievement Award; the Computer Pioneer Award from IEEE Computer Society; the Benjamin Franklin Medal; and, in 2014, the Dan David Foundation Prize for the Future of Time Dimension titled “Artificial Intelligence: The Digital Mind,” and the BBVA Group’s BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Lifetime Achievement Award. (© Academy)</figcaption></figure><p>In the 1980s, Minsky applied himself to a problem that has perplexed psychologists, neurologists, philosophers and theologians: What is consciousness? How is it possible that an organism such as a human being — a mass of cells, made in turn of chains of amino acids — can be aware of itself and its surroundings, can think, observe, react and conceptualize. Minsky and his colleague Seymour Papert theorized that the phenomenon we call consciousness is actually the cumulative effect of a panoply of redundant neural processes. Minsky and Papert presented their ideas to the general reading public in the 1986 book <em>The Society of Mind</em>.</p> <figure id="attachment_37588" style="width: 2858px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><noscript><img class="size-full wp-image-37588 " src="https://web.archive.org/web/20190115051330im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/wp-minsky-2001-san-antonio-symposiumpanel.jpg"></noscript><img class="size-full wp-image-37588 lazyload" alt="" width="2858" height="2449" data-sizes="(max-width: 2858px) 100vw, 2858px" data-srcset="/web/20190115051330im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/wp-minsky-2001-san-antonio-symposiumpanel.jpg 2858w, /web/20190115051330im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/wp-minsky-2001-san-antonio-symposiumpanel-380x326.jpg 380w, /web/20190115051330im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/wp-minsky-2001-san-antonio-symposiumpanel-760x651.jpg 760w" data-src="https://web.archive.org/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/wp-minsky-2001-san-antonio-symposiumpanel.jpg"><figcaption class="wp-caption-text">Minsky on a panel at the 2001 Academy of Achievement program in San Antonio about the future of technology with Academy members: filmmaker George Lucas, Bell Labs President Jeong Kim, Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, Microsoft’s Charles Simonyi, Stanford President John Hennessy, and telecom entrepreneur Kenan Sahin.</figcaption></figure><p>Advances in microprocessor technology and the resulting personal computer revolution spurred a revival of interest in Minsky’s ideas. The concept of artificial intelligence he pioneered has become a part of our daily lives, an advance we employ whenever we use personal computers or smartphones, conduct an Internet search, or use GPS, optical character recognition or voice-activated technology.</p> <p>Meanwhile, Minsky revisited his consideration of neural nets and pursued the possibilities of parallel processing — the simultaneous handling of information by multiple agents, as it occurs in the brain and as it can occur in manmade systems.</p> <figure id="attachment_37575" style="width: 2048px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><noscript><img class="size-full wp-image-37575 " src="https://web.archive.org/web/20190115051330im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/chicago_0776_JFR.jpg"></noscript><img class="size-full wp-image-37575 lazyload" alt="" width="2048" height="1360" data-sizes="(max-width: 2048px) 100vw, 2048px" data-srcset="/web/20190115051330im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/chicago_0776_JFR.jpg 2048w, /web/20190115051330im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/chicago_0776_JFR-380x252.jpg 380w, /web/20190115051330im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/chicago_0776_JFR-760x505.jpg 760w" data-src="https://web.archive.org/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/chicago_0776_JFR.jpg"><figcaption class="wp-caption-text">Professor Minsky and his wife, Dr. Gloria Rudisch, speaking to Academy member and Google co-founder Sergey Brin at a reception during the Academy of Achievement’s 2004 International Achievement Summit in Chicago.</figcaption></figure><p>In the opening decade of the 21st century, Dr. Minsky focused his attention on the functions of the human mind that seem least susceptible to electronic simulation. In his 2006 book, <em>The Emotion Machine: Commonsense Thinking, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of the Human Mind, </em>he argues that emotions are forms of thought, on a continuum with instinct and reason, not a separate form of experience.</p> <figure id="attachment_37658" style="width: 1200px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><noscript><img class="wp-image-37658 size-full " src="https://web.archive.org/web/20190115051330im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/theemotionmachine.jpg"></noscript><img class="wp-image-37658 size-full lazyload" alt="" width="1200" height="1800" data-sizes="(max-width: 1200px) 100vw, 1200px" data-srcset="/web/20190115051330im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/theemotionmachine.jpg 1200w, /web/20190115051330im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/theemotionmachine-253x380.jpg 253w, /web/20190115051330im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/theemotionmachine-507x760.jpg 507w" data-src="https://web.archive.org/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/theemotionmachine.jpg"><figcaption class="wp-caption-text">2006: <em>The Emotion Machine: Commonsense Thinking, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of the Human Mind</em> by Marvin Minsky. In this book, Professor Minsky continues his groundbreaking research, offering a new model for how our minds work. He argues that emotions, intuitions, and feelings are not distinct things, but different ways of thinking. By examining these different forms of mind activity, Minsky says, we can explain why our thought sometimes takes the form of carefully reasoned analysis and at other times turns to emotion. (Simon & Schuster)</figcaption></figure><p>Music remained a source of joy throughout Dr. Minsky’s life. An accomplished pianist, he amused himself by improvising fugues in the baroque style of J.S. Bach. Marvin Minsky died in 2016 at age 88. He was survived by his physician wife, Dr. Gloria Rudisch, three children and four grandchildren. As intelligent devices proliferate in our homes, and driverless cars roll onto our highways, it appears that AI will play an ever greater role in our lives, thanks to the insights and ingenuity of Marvin Minsky.</p></body></html> <div class="clearfix"> </div> </article> </div> </section> </div> <div class="tab-pane fade" id="profile" role="tabpanel"> <section class="clearfix"> <header class="editorial-article__header"> <figure class="text-xs-center"> <img class="inductee-badge" src="/web/20190115051330im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/themes/aoa/assets/images/inducted-badge@2x.png" alt="Inducted Badge" width="120" height="120"/> <figcaption class="serif-3 text-brand-primary"> Inducted in 1982 </figcaption> </figure> </header> <div class="row"> <aside class="col-md-4 sidebar"> <dl class="clearfix m-b-0"> <div class="col-xs-12 sidebar--chunk p-b-2"> <dt class="serif-7">Career</dt> <dd class="sans-2"> <div><a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/#filter=.mathematician">Mathematician</a></div> <div><a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/#filter=.computer-scientist">Computer Scientist</a></div> <div><a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/#filter=.inventor">Inventor</a></div> </dd> </div> <div class="col-xs-12 sidebar--chunk p-b-2"> <dt class="serif-7">Date of Birth</dt> <dd class="sans-2"> August 9, 1927 </dd> </div> <div class="col-xs-12 sidebar--chunk p-b-2"> <dt class="serif-7">Date of Death</dt> <dd class="sans-2"> January 20, 2016 </dd> </div> </dl> </aside> <article class="col-md-8 editorial-article clearfix"> <p>The revolution in information technology has transformed daily life throughout the world. In developed countries, most people became aware of these changes with the widespread adoption of the personal computer in the 1980s, the Internet in the 1990s, and mobile devices and smartphones in the decades since, but all of these innovations — and more developments yet to come — are the fruit of work carried out by an earlier generation of mathematicians and computer scientists, led by Dr. Marvin Minsky of MIT.</p> <p>Mathematician, inventor, visionary and philosopher, Marvin Minsky built the first neural network device as a graduate student at Princeton. His theoretical writings of the 1950s and early ‘60s became the basis for virtually all subsequent research in artificial intelligence (AI). Founder of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT, he prepared a generation of young computer scientists to create the Internet and today’s digital universe of shared information.</p> <p>In books such as <em>Perceptrons</em>, <em>The Society of Mind</em> and <em>The Emotion Machine</em> — written for the lay reader as well as the scientist — he not only explained the science behind AI, but explored its implications for the future and for our understanding of the nature of thought, feeling, consciousness, and what it means to be human.</p> </article> </div> </section> </div> <div class="tab-pane fade" id="interview" role="tabpanel"> <section class="clearfix"> <div class="col-md-12 interview-feature-video"> <figure> <div class="embed-responsive embed-responsive-16by9"> <iframe class="embed-responsive-item embed-responsive--has-thumbnail" width="200" height="150" src="https://web.archive.org/web/20190115051330if_/https://www.youtube.com/embed/FXyOeZ6wLtU?feature=oembed&autohide=1&hd=1&color=white&modestbranding=1&rel=0&showinfo=0&theme=light" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> <div class="embed-responsive__thumbnail ratio-container__image lazyload" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Minsky-Marvin-2000-Upscale-1of1.00_06_42_25.Still002-380x214.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Minsky-Marvin-2000-Upscale-1of1.00_06_42_25.Still002-760x428.jpg"></div> <div class="video-tag sans-4"> <i class="embed-responsive__play icon-icon_play-full text-brand-primary"></i> <div class="video-tag__text">Watch full interview</div> </div> </div> </figure> </div> <header class="col-md-12 text-xs-center m-b-2"> <i class="icon-icon_bio text-brand-primary"></i> </header> <aside class="col-md-4 sidebar"> <h2 class="serif-3 achiever--biography-subtitle">A Curious Mind</h2> <div class="sans-2">San Antonio, Texas</div> <div class="sans-2">May 4, 2001</div> </aside> <article class="editorial-article col-md-8">   <div class="achiever__interview-copy"> <p><strong>You were a Junior Fellow at Harvard in the 1950s when you first wrote about artificial intelligence. There weren’t many computers around back then. How did you become involved in it?</strong></p> </div>     <div class="achiever__video-block"> <figure class="achiever__interview-video"> <div class="embed-responsive embed-responsive-16by9"> <iframe class="embed-responsive-item embed-responsive--has-thumbnail" width="200" height="150" src="https://web.archive.org/web/20190115051330if_/https://www.youtube.com/embed/mVsCLJQcjJw?feature=oembed&autohide=1&hd=1&color=white&modestbranding=1&rel=0&showinfo=0&theme=light" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> <div class="embed-responsive__thumbnail ratio-container__image lazyload" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Minsky-Marvin-2000-Upscale-1of1.00_18_05_08.Still005-380x214.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Minsky-Marvin-2000-Upscale-1of1.00_18_05_08.Still005-760x428.jpg"></div> <i class="embed-responsive__play icon-icon_play-full text-brand-primary"></i> </div> <figcaption class="achiever__interview-video-terms"> <span>Keys to success —</span> <a class="comma-item" href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/keys-to-success/vision/">Vision</a> </figcaption> </figure>  <div class="achiever__interview-video__copy"> <p>Marvin Minsky: A Junior Fellow at Harvard is sort of king of the hill. He can go into any department in the university for three years and work on anything, and I worked on several different things in those three years. Then I started thinking about how would you make a computer think. I got a lot of theories about that. I started to write them down and bounce them around. And I guess I finished this set of little theories by 1961, and I published this big paper, and I never had any problems after that because that paper was — everyone in the world looked at that and said, “Oh, that is the right thing to work on. I’ll do this.” The paper had about 15 or 20 different things that had to be done, and I just lucked out. It became the standard, and the language I used for describing the different problems got to be what everybody — because, before that, it was a mess.</p> </div> </div>      <div class="achiever__interview-copy"> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd"> <html><body><p>Nobody had written a systematic plan of what to do. But I didn’t have that plan myself.</p> <figure id="attachment_38015" style="width: 2280px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><noscript><img class="size-full wp-image-38015 " src="https://web.archive.org/web/20190115051330im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/wp-Marvin_Gloria_Wedding_1952_Marvin-Minsky_-with-Marg018.jpg"></noscript><img class="size-full wp-image-38015 lazyload" alt="" width="2280" height="1854" data-sizes="(max-width: 2280px) 100vw, 2280px" data-srcset="/web/20190115051330im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/wp-Marvin_Gloria_Wedding_1952_Marvin-Minsky_-with-Marg018.jpg 2280w, /web/20190115051330im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/wp-Marvin_Gloria_Wedding_1952_Marvin-Minsky_-with-Marg018-380x309.jpg 380w, /web/20190115051330im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/wp-Marvin_Gloria_Wedding_1952_Marvin-Minsky_-with-Marg018-760x618.jpg 760w" data-src="https://web.archive.org/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/wp-Marvin_Gloria_Wedding_1952_Marvin-Minsky_-with-Marg018.jpg"><figcaption class="wp-caption-text">1952: While studying at Princeton, Marvin Minksy married Dr. Gloria Rudisch, a pediatrician. The Minskys were married for sixty years, until his death in 2016. They have three children: Henry, Juliana, and Margaret Minsky.</figcaption></figure><p><strong>Having set the map of the future in this field, how did you begin to develop a community around you to do this, or a position that would allow you to advance these questions?</strong></p></body></html> </div>     <div class="achiever__video-block"> <figure class="achiever__interview-video"> <div class="embed-responsive embed-responsive-16by9"> <iframe class="embed-responsive-item embed-responsive--has-thumbnail" width="200" height="150" src="https://web.archive.org/web/20190115051330if_/https://www.youtube.com/embed/YwWGNTTuwy0?feature=oembed&autohide=1&hd=1&color=white&modestbranding=1&rel=0&showinfo=0&theme=light" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> <div class="embed-responsive__thumbnail ratio-container__image lazyload" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Minsky-Marvin-2000-Upscale-1of1.00_18_04_05.Still006-380x214.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Minsky-Marvin-2000-Upscale-1of1.00_18_04_05.Still006-760x428.jpg"></div> <i class="embed-responsive__play icon-icon_play-full text-brand-primary"></i> </div> </figure>  <div class="achiever__interview-video__copy"> <p>Marvin Minsky: I always felt that I lived in a golden age and anything I did, people would say, “Yes, let’s do that.” And partly it was that starting in college and graduate school I really focused on mathematics. I became a good mathematician. And so when I started to suggest that people work on artificial intelligence, and these — I invented neural networks and things, and different ideas in psychology. And I noticed people would tell each other, “Well, that might sound nutty, but he’s a good mathematician, and he’s proved these pretty good theorems here and there.” And so if you go into a new field, it’s very nice if you — I mean, it’s sort of fake, because generally when a mathematician goes into psychology, they screw up.</p> </div> </div>      <div class="achiever__interview-copy"> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd"> <html><body><figure id="attachment_38012" style="width: 2280px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><noscript><img class="size-full wp-image-38012 " src="https://web.archive.org/web/20190115051330im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/wp-Marvin-Minsky-Claude-Shannon-Ray-Solomonoff-Plus-2-Dartmouth-1956-Conference.jpg"></noscript><img class="size-full wp-image-38012 lazyload" alt="" width="2280" height="1805" data-sizes="(max-width: 2280px) 100vw, 2280px" data-srcset="/web/20190115051330im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/wp-Marvin-Minsky-Claude-Shannon-Ray-Solomonoff-Plus-2-Dartmouth-1956-Conference.jpg 2280w, /web/20190115051330im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/wp-Marvin-Minsky-Claude-Shannon-Ray-Solomonoff-Plus-2-Dartmouth-1956-Conference-380x301.jpg 380w, /web/20190115051330im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/wp-Marvin-Minsky-Claude-Shannon-Ray-Solomonoff-Plus-2-Dartmouth-1956-Conference-760x602.jpg 760w" data-src="https://web.archive.org/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/wp-Marvin-Minsky-Claude-Shannon-Ray-Solomonoff-Plus-2-Dartmouth-1956-Conference.jpg"><figcaption class="wp-caption-text">In July of 1956, a group of scientists, including Marvin Minsky, Claude Shannon, and Ray Solomonoff, attended the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. The six-week summer workshop is considered by many to be the seminal event for artificial intelligence as a field.</figcaption></figure></body></html> </div>     <div class="achiever__video-block"> <figure class="achiever__interview-video"> <div class="embed-responsive embed-responsive-16by9"> <iframe class="embed-responsive-item embed-responsive--has-thumbnail" width="200" height="150" src="https://web.archive.org/web/20190115051330if_/https://www.youtube.com/embed/BZbVGhZW4ww?feature=oembed&autohide=1&hd=1&color=white&modestbranding=1&rel=0&showinfo=0&theme=light" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> <div class="embed-responsive__thumbnail ratio-container__image lazyload" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Minsky-Marvin-2000-Upscale-1of1.00_03_57_19.Still001-380x214.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Minsky-Marvin-2000-Upscale-1of1.00_03_57_19.Still001-760x428.jpg"></div> <i class="embed-responsive__play icon-icon_play-full text-brand-primary"></i> </div> </figure>  <div class="achiever__interview-video__copy"> <p>Marvin Minsky: Around 1963, some friends of mine went to the government to organize the future of information processing. There were some very visionary people. You know, the first really useful computers only started to appear around 1960. There were a lot of computers the ten years before that, but they were very expensive. And so one of my professor friends, who had been a teacher of mine at college, went to Washington and he organized this Advanced Research Projects Agency idea, which led to the Internet and parallel computing and all sorts of things, starting as early as 1963, and he decided he would give me a million dollars a year. The government was very loose then, and so a smart person in the Defense Department could just start a project, Cold War and everything. And suddenly this million dollars a year started arriving, and that was a lot of money, and there weren’t that many people in the world to hire. So, again, I was living in a golden age. If some young fellow who had come with what looked like a pretty good idea, I’d get him. It took a while to work up to spending a million a year. And if there were — you know, most managers have to say, “Well, we’ve got to make a choice, we can do this or that.” I never had to make a choice. I’d do both. And it wasn’t until the middle 1970s that things got more constrained and you couldn’t do any old thing that you wanted or both.</p> </div> </div>      <div class="achiever__interview-copy"> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd"> <html><body><figure id="attachment_37586" style="width: 2280px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><noscript><img class="size-full wp-image-37586 " src="https://web.archive.org/web/20190115051330im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/WP-2-MinskyReissSummitPanel.jpg"></noscript><img class="size-full wp-image-37586 lazyload" alt="" width="2280" height="1502" data-sizes="(max-width: 2280px) 100vw, 2280px" data-srcset="/web/20190115051330im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/WP-2-MinskyReissSummitPanel.jpg 2280w, /web/20190115051330im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/WP-2-MinskyReissSummitPanel-380x250.jpg 380w, /web/20190115051330im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/WP-2-MinskyReissSummitPanel-760x501.jpg 760w" data-src="https://web.archive.org/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/WP-2-MinskyReissSummitPanel.jpg"><figcaption class="wp-caption-text">Professor Marvin Minsky on a panel with Dr. Sheldon L. Glashow (Nobel Prize in Physics) and Astronomer Royal and Master of Trinity College at Cambridge Martin Rees at the 2000 International Achievement Summit in London.</figcaption></figure></body></html> </div>     <div class="achiever__video-block"> <figure class="achiever__interview-video"> <div class="embed-responsive embed-responsive-16by9"> <iframe class="embed-responsive-item embed-responsive--has-thumbnail" width="200" height="150" src="https://web.archive.org/web/20190115051330if_/https://www.youtube.com/embed/6PtRErZbLg4?feature=oembed&autohide=1&hd=1&color=white&modestbranding=1&rel=0&showinfo=0&theme=light" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> <div class="embed-responsive__thumbnail ratio-container__image lazyload" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Minsky-Marvin-2000-Upscale-1of1.00_18_10_24.Still007-380x214.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Minsky-Marvin-2000-Upscale-1of1.00_18_10_24.Still007-760x428.jpg"></div> <i class="embed-responsive__play icon-icon_play-full text-brand-primary"></i> </div> </figure>  <div class="achiever__interview-video__copy"> <p>Marvin Minsky: Another thing I should say is that I never liked making management decisions, and when we started the artificial intelligence project around 1958, I started it with my old friend from graduate school, John McCarthy, and we just co-directed it. There wasn’t any director. The two of us would run this project. Somebody would come in and say, “What should we do or could we do this?” And if I was there that day, I’d say yes or no. And if John was there that day, he would make a decision. We didn’t always decide the same thing, but we each could simulate how the other one would think. And then five years later, John went to — went west to California, to Stanford, started another laboratory, and luckily another marvelous person, Seymour Papert, appeared that year, and then for another ten years we co-directed the thing. So I think people are crazy who try to run a laboratory, and as far as I know, every other laboratory has a director, and that person usually becomes scientifically unproductive, runs out of ideas, and after a few years, the director of a great laboratory is a big liability because he’s lost touch. So — but I never managed anything myself. I had another person who thought almost the same way or — and if I had trouble making a decision, I wouldn’t worry about it much.</p> </div> </div>      <div class="achiever__interview-copy"> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd"> <html><body><p>You know, different people are good at different things, and their judgment was probably better than mine, and, well, we learned to know what each were good at. So I don’t understand modern politics or industry or something. I think these guys who try to run companies are just plain nuts, and they’re not very good at it.</p> <p>In the great fields of computer-related things, there wasn’t very much management science all those years. But, still, these big companies would get stuck and they just lost flexibility. The top people who had been pioneers five or ten years before just went to sea. You’d see Xerox, which had developed a wonderful computer that later became the Apple, its managers didn’t understand that, and they said, “Oh, well, IBM’s doing it, well, let’s make PCs.” And Xerox vanished from the — they couldn’t even make a laser printer even though they had invented the Xerox machine. They couldn’t get themselves together to realize it was important. And I think the answer is co-directing. But I’ve never met anyone who agrees with me about that.</p> <figure id="attachment_37571" style="width: 1536px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><noscript><img class="wp-image-37571 size-full " src="https://web.archive.org/web/20190115051330im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/2003academy0632.jpg"></noscript><img class="wp-image-37571 size-full lazyload" alt="" width="1536" height="1024" data-sizes="(max-width: 1536px) 100vw, 1536px" data-srcset="/web/20190115051330im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/2003academy0632.jpg 1536w, /web/20190115051330im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/2003academy0632-380x253.jpg 380w, /web/20190115051330im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/2003academy0632-760x507.jpg 760w" data-src="https://web.archive.org/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/2003academy0632.jpg"><figcaption class="wp-caption-text">Academy members: Jack Horner, Susan Butcher, Dorothy Hamill, and Marvin Minsky with Celeste Horner and David Monson between symposium sessions at the 2003 International Achievement Summit in Washington, D.C.</figcaption></figure><p><strong>A scientist who is going to have an influence will do it in two ways, at least. One will be through the process of scientific communication. The other will be through conversing with society about the ideas. You’ve managed both. When did you conceive of writing <em>The Society of Mind</em> as a book?</strong></p> <p>Marvin Minsky: Actually, Papert and I tried to write that theory for many years, so it must have started in 1962 or ‘3. By 1975, some of the ideas had developed, but we were having trouble organizing it. And he sort of turned into the field of concepts of education and how humans learn and so forth and wrote another book, and I drifted off, and I worked on <em>The Society of Mind</em> book for about ten years. But in the meantime, every two or three years I’d get some new theory and publish that separately, and eventually it became chapters in this big book.</p> <p><strong>What was the the essential message that <em>The Society of Mind</em> delivered or the idea that it presented?</strong></p> </body></html> </div>     <div class="achiever__video-block"> <figure class="achiever__interview-video"> <div class="embed-responsive embed-responsive-16by9"> <iframe class="embed-responsive-item embed-responsive--has-thumbnail" width="200" height="150" src="https://web.archive.org/web/20190115051330if_/https://www.youtube.com/embed/iBGqhqZ7BaI?feature=oembed&autohide=1&hd=1&color=white&modestbranding=1&rel=0&showinfo=0&theme=light" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> <div class="embed-responsive__thumbnail ratio-container__image lazyload" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Minsky-Marvin-2000-Upscale-1of1.00_18_10_24.Still007-380x214.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Minsky-Marvin-2000-Upscale-1of1.00_18_10_24.Still007-760x428.jpg"></div> <i class="embed-responsive__play icon-icon_play-full text-brand-primary"></i> </div> <figcaption class="achiever__interview-video-terms"> <span>Keys to success —</span> <a class="comma-item" href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/keys-to-success/vision/">Vision</a> </figcaption> </figure>  <div class="achiever__interview-video__copy"> <p>Marvin Minsky: The idea is that the mind is a highly evolved, very complicated mechanism with — and it very rarely has just one way of doing things. And that’s where it seemed to me psychological science got stuck. People would say, “Well, does learning work this way or that way? Or is memory organized this way or that way?” And it seemed to me that clearly people, if they used any particular way, no matter how good, it would get stuck on some kinds of problems, and you’d have to switch.</p> <p>So what we were doing in making the “Society of Mind” theory is saying there’s got to be a command and control hierarchy — or not hierarchy, there’s got to be a lot of different ways this thing could work, and different parts of it have to know when they’re doing badly or they have to have critics. And, actually, I’m finishing a new book about how the mind works, and this book is called <em>The Emotion Machine</em>, and I think it’s going to explain to everyone just what emotions are. And it turns out they’re very simple and very complex. An emotional state is just a particular way of thinking. If you’re angry, you think in a certain way. It’s not that there’s thinking and emotions which flavor it. It’s that there are different kinds of thinking.</p> <p>So if a person’s angry, it means that there’s some problems bothering him, a situation that he’s got to do something about, or she, and you have to do something pretty quickly. You’re going to turn off all your wonderful resources for figuring out what’s best in the far future. Maybe you’ll turn off most of your mechanisms for doing comfortable, smooth, graceful social relationships. And if this guy’s annoying you enough, maybe you’ll just hit him or insult him or do something that people would say is very emotional.</p> <p>But from the point of view of the parts of your mind that are still working to solve this problem, these are just the right things to do if you’re in a hurry. So most emotional behavior has evolved. These different subsets of how the mind — your mind will work — have evolved to be quite good at handling particular situations. And so people say, “Well, what is emotion? It’s so mysterious.” The answer is, “No, it’s so trivial.” We just give these emotional names to the different ways people have of thinking.</p> </div> </div>      <div class="achiever__interview-copy"> <p>And the same for consciousness.</p> </div>     <div class="achiever__video-block"> <figure class="achiever__interview-video"> <div class="embed-responsive embed-responsive-16by9"> <iframe class="embed-responsive-item embed-responsive--has-thumbnail" width="200" height="150" src="https://web.archive.org/web/20190115051330if_/https://www.youtube.com/embed/KkLlIwxv3ZU?feature=oembed&autohide=1&hd=1&color=white&modestbranding=1&rel=0&showinfo=0&theme=light" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> <div class="embed-responsive__thumbnail ratio-container__image lazyload" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Minsky-Marvin-2000-Upscale-1of1.00_09_46_10.Still003-380x214.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Minsky-Marvin-2000-Upscale-1of1.00_09_46_10.Still003-760x428.jpg"></div> <i class="embed-responsive__play icon-icon_play-full text-brand-primary"></i> </div> </figure>  <div class="achiever__interview-video__copy"> <p>Marvin Minsky: People say, “What’s the mystery? What’s consciousness?” And the answer is there isn’t any such thing. We’re not very conscious to begin with. You don’t know how your mind works. You don’t know about the 400 different brain centers. But some parts of your brain, like a computer, are pretty good at remembering a little bit about what the others did in the last two or three minutes. That’s very useful because if you’re solving a problem and get stuck, then this part of it then can say, “Well, I see what went wrong. You tried this and it didn’t work, and you kept trying it. That was stupid.”</p> <p>So it seems to me consciousness is the set of about 20 different things you do when you get into trouble. They all depend on keeping some records of others, what you did, so that you can recognize — or so that this part of your brain can recognize that this was a bad pattern and it wasn’t right to react that way. So you take this big bunch of ideas and say, “How do I make a big machine with hundreds of parts that’s so resourceful that whatever happens” — I mean, a person never gets stuck like a computer, which jams. If it’s really frustrating, the person will just change the subject and say, “Well, I’m going to have lunch or take a nap.”</p> <p>I don’t see anything mysterious about it. But if you try to take these hundreds of wonderfully highly evolved things and say there’s a thing called consciousness that does that, then, of course, it’s a total mystery. But that’s because you’re asking a question. Here’s all this complicated stuff we do. How could a little round shiny ball with no interior do all that? The answer is, “Duh.” People who talk about consciousness are, to me, people who say, “Duh.”</p> </div> </div>      <div class="achiever__interview-copy"> <p><strong>So consciousness is not a useful word. Is intuition a useful word?</strong></p> </div>     <div class="achiever__video-block"> <figure class="achiever__interview-video"> <div class="embed-responsive embed-responsive-16by9"> <iframe class="embed-responsive-item embed-responsive--has-thumbnail" width="200" height="150" src="https://web.archive.org/web/20190115051330if_/https://www.youtube.com/embed/L8j2CGJA4oU?feature=oembed&autohide=1&hd=1&color=white&modestbranding=1&rel=0&showinfo=0&theme=light" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> <div class="embed-responsive__thumbnail ratio-container__image lazyload" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Minsky-Marvin-2000-Upscale-1of1.00_14_00_26.Still004-380x214.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Minsky-Marvin-2000-Upscale-1of1.00_14_00_26.Still004-760x428.jpg"></div> <i class="embed-responsive__play icon-icon_play-full text-brand-primary"></i> </div> <figcaption class="achiever__interview-video-terms"> <span>Keys to success —</span> <a class="comma-item" href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/keys-to-success/perseverance/">Perseverance</a> </figcaption> </figure>  <div class="achiever__interview-video__copy"> <p>Marvin Minsky: People don’t have the slightest idea about how they do reasoning, and intuition is a polite word for guessing. And some people think that there’s some special kind of intuition which gives you the right answer in a magical way. And you just follow one of those people around, and you’ll see — a friend of mine followed a squirrel around for a whole day, which is very hard, and — because he was interested, how does the squirrel do these wonderful things of leaping from branch to branch? Well, it turns out they fall off a lot.</p> <p>He watched this graceful squirrel and how it missed a branch and it just barely managed to catch a lower one, and it didn’t bother him much because it’s very light, and then later in the afternoon it fell all the way off and dropped 30 feet. It didn’t bother it much. And so when — if you’re looking for a miracle, you’ll never get anywhere. But if you’re looking for intuition, which is a name for hundreds of ways of guessing, and you’re realistic and say there isn’t any real intuition, then you’ll find the 50 pretty good ones.</p> </div> </div>     <aside class="collapse" id="full-interview">    <div class="achiever__interview-copy"> <p><strong>Dr. Minsky, let’s look at a portrait of the scientist as a child. Were you aware of an interest in science at a fairly early age?</strong></p> <p>Marvin Minsky: Oh, I think when I was a young child I was terribly interested in how everything worked, and some of my first reading was in the science fiction area as well as science, so I ran across the short stories of H.G. Wells, who was the Isaac Asimov of the previous generation.</p> <p><strong>Were there scientific interests in your family? What did your father do?</strong></p> <p>Marvin Minsky: My father was an eye surgeon who did all sorts of research in medicine, and there were chemistry books and physics books and math books around the house. And I think ever since I was a small child, that was what interested me most.</p> <p><strong>Were there clear expectations for you as you were growing up, a notion that your father and mother had of where your career should go in life?</strong></p> <p>Marvin Minsky: No, I don’t think so, but they always expected us to be good at something.</p> <p><strong>You had a very good early education at the Fieldston School. Was there any particular increasing interest in any one field?</strong></p> <p>Marvin Minsky: Well, I think I was very interested in many fields of science: chemistry, biology, mathematics, physics — physics came later. But those things seemed very wonderful and clear, and I was a kind of electronic amateur. I’d build radios and other gadgets, high-voltage spark coils.</p> <p><strong>Was there a particular teacher of importance to you in your younger years?</strong></p> <p>Marvin Minsky: Oh, I had many good teachers, and I got attached to a different one each year, I think. There was a chemistry teacher who let me use the laboratory in fourth grade, and all my life I’ve just — wherever I was, I would find some person that I admired and tried to learn to think the way that person does.</p> <p><strong>After Fieldston, what was the next stage of your education?</strong></p> <p>Marvin Minsky: Well, I went to the High School of Science in New York, and that was full of wonderful things. Here was a high school, it was, you know, in the World War II period. It was full of Ph.D.s, refugees, all sorts of marvelous people. And when I got to college, that seemed a little bit of a step down from the Bronx High School of Science in New York.</p> <p><strong>So by then you had already felt you had a confident beginning in science, but not yet a direction?</strong></p> <p>Marvin Minsky: Well, I never had a sense of direction, but I knew — always felt that it would be wonderful to know how physics worked and how the universe worked and it would be nice to know how living things worked. And I think somewhat later it seemed to me that understanding how the brain works or the mind works was probably the most important and interesting problem, and nobody seemed to know much about it.</p> <p><strong>Why do you think that was? I mean, was it considered by everyone an uninteresting question or one that people didn’t think could be answered?</strong></p> <p>Marvin Minsky: Well, physics is hundreds of years old. Archimedes was pretty good at it, and Galileo and Newton made major steps. And so in the 20th century, physics was several centuries old. Biology came later, but there was quite a lot known. But in psychology, it’s a wonderful field which only started, a few people around 1850, and even by 1900, there weren’t very many people making good theories. Sigmund Freud, who I read when I was a child, was the only one who seemed to have a kind of architectural idea of the mind is made of many parts, and he made speculations about how it works.</p> <p><strong>You read Sigmund Freud as a child?</strong></p> <p>Marvin Minsky: Yes.</p> <p><strong>So we can find inklings in retrospect of what became a lifelong interest.</strong></p> <p>Marvin Minsky: We had lots of medical books around the house.</p> <p><strong>How did you proceed to find the opportunity to study what you wanted to study? Was it as a Junior Fellow? When does your determination to ask questions others had not asked begin to rise?</strong></p> <p>Marvin Minsky: Well, as soon as I got to college, I ran into people. There was a wonderful young mathematician named Andrew Gleason, and I met him when I was a young student. We used to have lunch, and once I asked him what he was working on, and he said he was trying to solve a mathematical problem called Hilbert’s Fifth Problem about the relation of topology to geometry. And he described this problem. I couldn’t understand it very well. And I asked him, “Well, how do you plan to solve that?” And he said, “Well, I think there are three main steps I’ll have to do,” and he described them and I dimly understood them. I said, “How long do you think that’ll take?” And he said, “Well, that’s about eight years, because this problem takes three years, and this three, and that should take two.” And that’s how long it took, and I became sort of — I followed him around and — you see, some people go to classes to learn what the teacher tells them. But unconsciously — and I don’t know when I started doing this — if I liked how somebody thinks, I would listen to them. I wouldn’t pay so much attention to what they were explaining, but I’d say, “How did he get that idea? How did he think to explain this or that?” And sometimes I felt like a kind of vampire. I’d meet these people — Gleason, George Miller was a great psychologist, Warren McCullough, in later life Richard Feynman and many wonderful people. And I would just hang around. When I found one of these persons, I’d hang around them for — for months or longer, and whatever they said I — what could I have — what state could I have been that I would answer that way? So I — you know, I had sort of a library of these people. Maybe novelists do that when they make up characters in their story. But I have a little population of different scientists, and Seymour Papert and John McCarthy were two others that I worked with for years. And I got into the state that if somebody asked me something, I would think, “Well, what would John say about that? What would Papert say?”</p> <p><strong>That’s a wonderful portrayal of learning.</strong></p> <p>Marvin Minsky: Well, it’s a wonderful situation because then sometimes these people would argue in my head. Gradually I came to the point that if you see something, you should make three or four explanations of it and then thrash it out between them, because in psychology there isn’t one reason why you do anything. There may be dozens. And so you have to cover the field with these different theories.</p> <p><strong>The field of artificial intelligence has come a long way since you pioneered it in the 1950s.</strong></p> <p>Marvin Minsky: Oh, yes. It’s a very popular subject. It’s not very well defined, so — but there must be more than 100,000 scientists working in that general field, and some of them are working on trying to make computers solve particular kinds of problems. And they write new kinds of software called expert systems. The trouble with those is they’re good at one thing, but they can’t do anything else.</p> <p><strong>Your work has obvious implications for the future development of computers, machines, as they incorporate these possible ways of thinking. Has it had an effect on the psychological treatment of human beings? I mean, is it — is it just the transference of what you’re learning about the mind into machines, or is it going back into notions of psychology itself?</strong></p> <p>Marvin Minsky: Well, the theories that Papert and I developed earlier — and he was mainly responsible for a lot of ideas about thinking in education, and these have had some impact. He has a big following. The theories I have about how to make a big thinking machine are still being debated, and there’s only about half a dozen people who are following these right now. But I expect we’re competing with some very big fads. There’s 40,000 people working on something called neural nets, which I invented in college and fussed around with for four or five years, and decided that was — those things could do something, but they weren’t very good, and in many ways they’re a dead end. Because when a neural network solves a problem or recognizes a pattern, that could be useful in practice. But if another part of the machine tries to reason or think about how this part did it — there’s nothing, because the neural network ends up with just a bunch of formulas and numbers, but no articulate explanation of why it worked.</p> <p><strong>So it’s not a dead end but it’s a limited end.</strong></p> <p>Marvin Minsky: It’s a very valuable engineering tool. But it’s very limited for theories of psychology, because large parts of the brain do things that way, but they’re not accessible to reflective thinking. And so if you get good at doing something in that way, then you can’t even explain how you do it to your students. So it’s very useful, but it doesn’t lead very far. Then there are four or five other big fads in artificial intelligence, and each of which — like people who say, “Can we do common-sense reasoning by using mathematical logic?” There are about ten- or twenty thousand people who specialize in that. It’s hard to believe. And they slowly make progress, a little bit every decade, but I don’t think it’s going to come to much because it’s something that people use only in very rare emergencies… and only very few people…</p> <p><strong>So only 12 of you are working in the direction you think in the end will be the most fruitful?</strong></p> <p>Marvin Minsky: Yes. Actually, only five or six. There’s a fellow named Aaron Sloman in England who has very similar theories to mine, and wonderful theories. There’s Doug Hofstadter, who’s rather well-known in Indiana, and he has a lot of ideas that are similar to this. And another researcher named Douglas Lenat, who has a company that’s trying to develop a system somewhat like the kind I’m looking for that does common-sense reasoning. But only five or six people in the whole world. So any student who wants to get into psychology, right now the students are like lemmings. They say, “Well, it’s popular to study brain science, I’ll do that.” Or, “It’s popular to do neural networks; I see 30,000 people doing it, it must be good.” And my advice is if a lot of people are doing it, don’t waste your time. They might be right, but of the 30,000, only five of them will actually — the rest might as well not be there.</p> <p><strong>I think that’s a perfect final statement. Thank you, Dr. Minsky.</strong></p> </div>  </aside>  <div class="read-more__toggle collapsed" data-toggle="collapse" data-target="#full-interview"><a href="#" class="sans-4 btn">Read full interview</a></div> </article> </section> </div> <div class="tab-pane fade" id="gallery" role="tabpanel"> <section class="isotope-wrapper">  <header class="toolbar toolbar--gallery bg-white clearfix"> <div class="col-md-6"> <div class="serif-4">Marvin Minsky, Ph.D. Gallery</div> </div> <div class="col-md-6 text-md-right isotope-toolbar"> <ul class="list-unstyled list-inline m-b-0 text-brand-primary sans-4"> <li class="list-inline-item" data-filter=".photo"><i class="icon-icon_camera"></i>35 photos</li> </ul> </div> </header> <div class="isotope-gallery isotope-box single-achiever__gallery clearfix"> <figure class="isotope-item ratio-container--gallery photo" data-category="photo" data-ratio="0.66710526315789" title="" data-gtm-category="photo" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever - ">   <div class="lazyload ratio-container__image" data-toggle="modal" data-target="#imageModal" data-image-src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/2003academy0632.jpg" data-image-caption="Celeste Horner, Jack Horner, Susan Butcher, Dorothy Hamill, Marvin Minsky and David Monson between symposium sessions at the 2003 International Achievement Summit in Washington, D.C. (© Academy of Achievement)" data-image-copyright="2003academy0632" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/2003academy0632-380x253.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2017/03/2003academy0632-760x507.jpg"></div>  </figure> <figure class="isotope-item ratio-container--gallery photo" data-category="photo" data-ratio="0.65263157894737" title="" data-gtm-category="photo" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever - ">   <div class="lazyload ratio-container__image" data-toggle="modal" data-target="#imageModal" data-image-src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/AP_699678280896.jpg" data-image-caption="1987: Marvin Minsky speaks to the audience during a panel discussion on "Artificial Intelligence: Society's Atlas or Achilles" at the Paramount Theater in Seattle. In 1985, Minsky became a founding member of the MIT Media Lab, where he was named the Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Sciences, and where he continued to teach and mentor. (AP Photo/Robert Kaiser, File)" data-image-copyright="Marvin Minsky" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/AP_699678280896-380x248.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2017/03/AP_699678280896-760x496.jpg"></div>  </figure> <figure class="isotope-item ratio-container--gallery photo" data-category="photo" data-ratio="0.66447368421053" title="" data-gtm-category="photo" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever - ">   <div class="lazyload ratio-container__image" data-toggle="modal" data-target="#imageModal" data-image-src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/chicago_0662_JFR.jpg" data-image-caption="Academy Members Marvin Minsky, Emilio Azcárraga Jean, Carlos Slim and Bill Clinton during the 2004 International Achievement Summit in Chicago. (© Academy of Achievement)" data-image-copyright="chicago_0662_JFR" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/chicago_0662_JFR-380x252.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2017/03/chicago_0662_JFR-760x505.jpg"></div>  </figure> <figure class="isotope-item ratio-container--gallery photo" data-category="photo" data-ratio="0.66447368421053" title="" data-gtm-category="photo" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever - ">   <div class="lazyload ratio-container__image" data-toggle="modal" data-target="#imageModal" data-image-src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/chicago_0663_JFR.jpg" data-image-caption="Marvin Minsky, Carlos Slim and Bill Clinton during the 2004 International Achievement Summit in Chicago. (© Academy of Achievement)" data-image-copyright="chicago_0663_JFR" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/chicago_0663_JFR-380x252.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2017/03/chicago_0663_JFR-760x505.jpg"></div>  </figure> <figure class="isotope-item ratio-container--gallery photo" data-category="photo" data-ratio="0.66447368421053" title="" data-gtm-category="photo" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever - ">   <div class="lazyload ratio-container__image" data-toggle="modal" data-target="#imageModal" data-image-src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/chicago_0776_JFR.jpg" data-image-caption="Marvin Minsky and his wife, Gloria Rudisch, speaking to Sergey Brin at a reception during the 2004 International Achievement Summit in Chicago. (© Academy of Achievement)" data-image-copyright="chicago_0776_JFR" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/chicago_0776_JFR-380x252.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2017/03/chicago_0776_JFR-760x505.jpg"></div>  </figure> <figure class="isotope-item ratio-container--gallery photo" data-category="photo" data-ratio="0.66184210526316" title="" data-gtm-category="photo" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever - ">   <div class="lazyload ratio-container__image" data-toggle="modal" data-target="#imageModal" data-image-src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/GettyImages-50418421.jpg" data-image-caption="1986: Professor Marvin Minsky of MIT in front of the Connection Machine (CM), a massively parallel computer Daniel Hillis and others were developing to perform tasks that no conventional, sequential machine can solve in a reasonable time. (Photo by Steve Liss/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images)" data-image-copyright="Professor Marvin Minsky of MIT in front" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/GettyImages-50418421-380x252.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2017/03/GettyImages-50418421-760x503.jpg"></div>  </figure> <figure class="isotope-item ratio-container--gallery photo" data-category="photo" data-ratio="1.189358372457" title="1968: Marvin Minsky in a lab at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). His own intellect was wide-ranging and his interests were eclectic. While earning a degree in mathematics at Harvard he also studied music. Minsky was a gifted pianist — one of only a handful of people in the world who could improvise fugues, the polyphonic counterpoint that distinguish Western classical music. His influential 1981 paper “Music, Mind and Meaning” illuminated the connections between music, psychology, and the mind." data-gtm-category="photo" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever - 1968: Marvin Minsky in a lab at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). His own intellect was wide-ranging and his interests were eclectic. While earning a degree in mathematics at Harvard he also studied music. Minsky was a gifted pianist — one of only a handful of people in the world who could improvise fugues, the polyphonic counterpoint that distinguish Western classical music. His influential 1981 paper “Music, Mind and Meaning” illuminated the connections between music, psychology, and the mind.">   <div class="lazyload ratio-container__image" data-toggle="modal" data-target="#imageModal" data-image-src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/gjs001Marvin-L-Minsky-in-Detroit-Sep-30-Oct-1-1968-at-GM-Research.jpg" data-image-caption="September 30, 1968: Marvin Minsky, Co-Director, MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (1959-1974), speaking at General Motors Research Laboratories in Detroit. " data-image-copyright="gjs001Marvin L Minsky in Detroit, Sep 30-Oct 1, 1968 at GM Research" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/gjs001Marvin-L-Minsky-in-Detroit-Sep-30-Oct-1-1968-at-GM-Research-320x380.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2017/03/gjs001Marvin-L-Minsky-in-Detroit-Sep-30-Oct-1-1968-at-GM-Research-639x760.jpg"></div>  </figure> <figure class="isotope-item ratio-container--gallery photo" data-category="photo" data-ratio="0.66710526315789" title="" data-gtm-category="photo" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever - ">   <div class="lazyload ratio-container__image" data-toggle="modal" data-target="#imageModal" data-image-src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Marvin_Minsky_1.jpg" data-image-caption="2012: A member of the NAS, NAE and Argentine NAS, Marvin Minsky has received the ACM Turing Award, the MIT Killian Award, the Japan Prize, the IJCAI Research Excellence Award, the Rank Prize and the Robert Wood Prize for Optoelectronics, and the Benjamin Franklin Medal." data-image-copyright="Marvin Minsky" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Marvin_Minsky_1-380x253.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Marvin_Minsky_1-760x507.jpg"></div>  </figure> <figure class="isotope-item ratio-container--gallery photo" data-category="photo" data-ratio="1.4990138067061" title="" data-gtm-category="photo" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever - ">   <div class="lazyload ratio-container__image" data-toggle="modal" data-target="#imageModal" data-image-src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/marvin-minsky.jpg" data-image-caption="Minsky published <i>The Emotion Machine</i> in 2006, a sequel to <i>The Society of Mind</i>, which proposes theories that could account for human higher-level feelings, goals, emotions, and conscious thoughts in terms of multiple levels of processes, some of which can reflect on the others. By providing us with a variety of "ways to think," these processes could account for much of our uniquely human resourcefulness. (Philip Greenspun)" data-image-copyright="marvin-minsky" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/marvin-minsky-253x380.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2017/03/marvin-minsky-507x760.jpg"></div>  </figure> <figure class="isotope-item ratio-container--gallery photo" data-category="photo" data-ratio="0.66710526315789" title="" data-gtm-category="photo" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever - ">   <div class="lazyload ratio-container__image" data-toggle="modal" data-target="#imageModal" data-image-src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/marvin-minsky-bot-D0M7FA.jpg" data-image-caption="1980s: Marvin Minsky, Donner Professor of Science, MIT (1974-1989), wearing an interactive glove in the MIT robotics lab. Minsky's inventions include SNARC, the first neural network simulator (1951); the confocal scanning microscope (1955); the first head-mounted graphical display (1963); the concept of binary-tree robotic manipulation (1963); the serpentine hydraulic robot arm (1967) (Boston Museum of Science); the "Muse" musical variations synthesizer (1970) (with E. Fredkin); and the first LOGO "turtle" device (1972) (with S. Papert). (Dan McCoy/Rainbow/RGB Ventures/SuperStock/Alamy)" data-image-copyright="Portrait Of Marvin Minsky" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/marvin-minsky-bot-D0M7FA-380x253.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2017/03/marvin-minsky-bot-D0M7FA-760x507.jpg"></div>  </figure> <figure class="isotope-item ratio-container--gallery photo" data-category="photo" data-ratio="0.75" title="" data-gtm-category="photo" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever - ">   <div class="lazyload ratio-container__image" data-toggle="modal" data-target="#imageModal" data-image-src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/marvin-minsky-getty2.jpg" data-image-caption="2008: Marvin Minsky, Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Sciences, MIT. (Getty Images)" data-image-copyright="marvin-minsky-getty2" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/marvin-minsky-getty2-380x285.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2017/03/marvin-minsky-getty2-760x570.jpg"></div>  </figure> <figure class="isotope-item ratio-container--gallery photo" data-category="photo" data-ratio="0.67763157894737" title="" data-gtm-category="photo" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever - ">   <div class="lazyload ratio-container__image" data-toggle="modal" data-target="#imageModal" data-image-src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/minsky_premio_fronteras.jpg" data-image-caption="2013: Marvin Minsky wins the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the Information and Communication Technologies category. The BBVA Foundation engages in the promotion of research, advanced training and the transmission of knowledge to society, focusing on the emerging issues of the 21st century in five areas: Environment, Biomedicine and Health, Economy and Society, Basic Sciences and Technology, and Arts and Humanities. The awards are presented in June each year at a ceremony held in the Marqués de Salamanca Palace, Madrid headquarters of the BBVA Foundation, and attended by representatives of Spain’s scientific and cultural communities." data-image-copyright="minsky_premio_fronteras" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/minsky_premio_fronteras-380x258.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2017/03/minsky_premio_fronteras-760x515.jpg"></div>  </figure> <figure class="isotope-item ratio-container--gallery photo" data-category="photo" data-ratio="1.4990138067061" title="" data-gtm-category="photo" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever - ">   <div class="lazyload ratio-container__image" data-toggle="modal" data-target="#imageModal" data-image-src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/perceptrons.jpg" data-image-caption="1969: <i>Perceptrons: An Introduction to Computational Geometry</i> by Marvin Minsky and Seymour A. Papert. <i>Perceptrons</i> is the first systematic study of parallelism in computation and a classical work on threshold automata networks. Minsky and Papert's book was the first example of a mathematical analysis carried far enough to show the exact limitations of a class of computing machines that could seriously be considered as models of the brain." data-image-copyright="perceptrons" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/perceptrons-253x380.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2017/03/perceptrons-507x760.jpg"></div>  </figure> <figure class="isotope-item ratio-container--gallery photo" data-category="photo" data-ratio="1.2903225806452" title="" data-gtm-category="photo" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever - ">   <div class="lazyload ratio-container__image" data-toggle="modal" data-target="#imageModal" data-image-src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/societyofthemind.jpg" data-image-caption="In the early 1970s, Minsky and Papert began formulating a theory called The Society of Mind, which combined insights from developmental child psychology and their experience with research on artificial intelligence. The Society of Mind proposes that intelligence is not the product of any singular mechanism, but comes from the managed interaction of a diverse variety of resourceful agents. They argued that such diversity is necessary because different tasks require fundamentally different mechanisms; this transforms psychology from a fruitless quest for a few "basic" principles into a search for mechanisms that a mind could use to manage the interaction of many diverse elements. Bits and pieces of this theory emerged in papers throughout the '70s and early '80s. Papert turned his energies to applying these new ideas to transforming education, while Minsky continued to work primarily on the theory. In 1985, he published <i>The Society of Mind</i>, a book in which 270 interconnected one-page ideas reflect the structure of the theory itself. Each page either proposes one such mechanism to account for some psychological phenomenon or addresses a problem introduced by some proposed solution on another page. In 2006, Minsky published a sequel, <i>The Emotion Machine</i>, which proposes theories that could account for human higher-level feelings, goals, emotions, and conscious thoughts in terms of multiple levels of processes, some of which can reflect on the others. By providing us with a variety of "ways to think," these processes could account for much of our uniquely human resourcefulness." data-image-copyright="societyofthemind" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/societyofthemind-295x380.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2017/03/societyofthemind-589x760.jpg"></div>  </figure> <figure class="isotope-item ratio-container--gallery photo" data-category="photo" data-ratio="0.65921052631579" title="" data-gtm-category="photo" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever - ">   <div class="lazyload ratio-container__image" data-toggle="modal" data-target="#imageModal" data-image-src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/WP-2-MinskyReissSummitPanel.jpg" data-image-caption="Professor Marvin Minsky on a panel with Dr. Sheldon L. Glashow (Nobel Prize in Physics) and Astronomer Royal and Master of Trinity College at Cambridge Martin Rees at the 2000 International Achievement Summit in London. (© Academy of Achievement)" data-image-copyright="WP-2-MinskyReissSummitPanel" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/WP-2-MinskyReissSummitPanel-380x250.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2017/03/WP-2-MinskyReissSummitPanel-760x501.jpg"></div>  </figure> <figure class="isotope-item ratio-container--gallery photo" data-category="photo" data-ratio="0.98815789473684" title="" data-gtm-category="photo" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever - ">   <div class="lazyload ratio-container__image" data-toggle="modal" data-target="#imageModal" data-image-src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/wp-Minsky-Marvin-and-Tracy-Kidder-2001-Summit-San-Antonio-2-of-2.jpg" data-image-caption="Awards Council member Marvin Minsky presents the Academy's Golden Plate Award to Tracy Kidder during the 2001 Academy of Achievement Summit in San Antonio, Texas. In addition to the Turing Award, Minsky received honors over the years, including the Japan Prize; the Royal Society of Medicine’s Rank Prize (for Optoelectronics); the Optical Society of America’s R.W. Wood Prize; MIT’s James R. Killian Jr. Faculty Achievement Award; the Computer Pioneer Award from IEEE Computer Society; the Benjamin Franklin Medal; and, in 2014, the Dan David Foundation Prize for the Future of Time Dimension, titled “Artificial Intelligence: The Digital Mind,” and the BBVA Group’s BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Lifetime Achievement Award." data-image-copyright="wp-Minsky, Marvin and Tracy Kidder 2001 Summit San Antonio 2 of 2" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/wp-Minsky-Marvin-and-Tracy-Kidder-2001-Summit-San-Antonio-2-of-2-380x375.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2017/03/wp-Minsky-Marvin-and-Tracy-Kidder-2001-Summit-San-Antonio-2-of-2-760x751.jpg"></div>  </figure> <figure class="isotope-item ratio-container--gallery photo" data-category="photo" data-ratio="0.85657894736842" title="" data-gtm-category="photo" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever - ">   <div class="lazyload ratio-container__image" data-toggle="modal" data-target="#imageModal" data-image-src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/wp-minsky-2001-san-antonio-symposiumpanel.jpg" data-image-caption="Professor Marvin Minsky, far left, is on a panel at the 2001 Academy of Achievement program in San Antonio about the future of technology with Academy members: filmmaker George Lucas, Bell Labs President Jeong Kim, Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, Microsoft’s Charles Simonyi, Stanford President John Hennessy, and telecommunications entrepreneur Kenan Sahin." data-image-copyright="wp-minsky-2001 san antonio-symposiumpanel" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/wp-minsky-2001-san-antonio-symposiumpanel-380x326.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2017/03/wp-minsky-2001-san-antonio-symposiumpanel-760x651.jpg"></div>  </figure> <figure class="isotope-item ratio-container--gallery photo" data-category="photo" data-ratio="1.2541254125413" title="" data-gtm-category="photo" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever - ">   <div class="lazyload ratio-container__image" data-toggle="modal" data-target="#imageModal" data-image-src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/26minsky-obit-web-superJumbo.jpg" data-image-caption="1968: A native New Yorker, Minsky was born on August 9, 1927, and entered Harvard University after returning from service in the U.S. Navy during World War II. After graduating from Harvard with honors in 1950, he attended Princeton University, receiving his Ph.D. in mathematics in 1954. In 1951, his first year at Princeton, he built the first neural network simulator. Minsky joined the faculty of MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in 1958, and co-founded the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (now the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory) the following year. At the AI Lab, he aimed to explore how to endow machines with human-like perception and intelligence. He created robotic hands that can manipulate objects, developed new programming frameworks, and wrote extensively about philosophical issues in artificial intelligence. Minsky received the world’s top honors for his pioneering work and mentoring role in the field of artificial intelligence, including the A.M. Turing Award — the highest honor in computer science — in 1969. (Photo courtesy of GJS)" data-image-copyright="26minsky-obit-web-superJumbo" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/26minsky-obit-web-superJumbo-303x380.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2017/03/26minsky-obit-web-superJumbo-606x760.jpg"></div>  </figure> <figure class="isotope-item ratio-container--gallery photo" data-category="photo" data-ratio="1.4990138067061" title="" data-gtm-category="photo" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever - ">   <div class="lazyload ratio-container__image" data-toggle="modal" data-target="#imageModal" data-image-src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/theemotionmachine.jpg" data-image-caption="2006: <i>The Emotion Machine: Commonsense Thinking, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of the Human Mind</i> by Marvin Minsky. In this book, Minsky continues his groundbreaking research, offering a new model for how our minds work. He argues that emotions, intuitions, and feelings are not distinct things, but different ways of thinking. By examining these different forms of mind activity, Minsky says, we can explain why our thought sometimes takes the form of carefully reasoned analysis and at other times turns to emotion. He shows how our minds progress from simple, instinctive kinds of thought to more complex forms, such as consciousness or self-awareness. And he argues that because we tend to see our thinking as fragmented, we fail to appreciate what powerful thinkers we really are. Indeed, says Minsky, if thinking can be understood as the step-by-step process that it is, then we can build machines — artificial intelligences — that not only can assist with our thinking, by thinking as we do, but have the potential to be as conscious as we are." data-image-copyright="theemotionmachine" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/theemotionmachine-253x380.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2017/03/theemotionmachine-507x760.jpg"></div>  </figure> <figure class="isotope-item ratio-container--gallery photo" data-category="photo" data-ratio="1.4366729678639" title="" data-gtm-category="photo" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever - ">   <div class="lazyload ratio-container__image" data-toggle="modal" data-target="#imageModal" data-image-src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/wp-Marvin-Minsky-swimming-c_1940_2001-01-11-MLLP706.jpg" data-image-caption="1940: Marvin Minsky swimming. (Margaret Minsky)" data-image-copyright="1940: Marvin Minsky swimming." data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/wp-Marvin-Minsky-swimming-c_1940_2001-01-11-MLLP706-265x380.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2017/04/wp-Marvin-Minsky-swimming-c_1940_2001-01-11-MLLP706-529x760.jpg"></div>  </figure> <figure class="isotope-item ratio-container--gallery photo" data-category="photo" data-ratio="1.2063492063492" title="" data-gtm-category="photo" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever - ">   <div class="lazyload ratio-container__image" data-toggle="modal" data-target="#imageModal" data-image-src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/wp-Marvin_At_Piano_60s_Marvin-at-Piano-by-1983.jpg" data-image-caption="1983: Marvin at his piano. (Margaret Minsky)" data-image-copyright="1983: Marvin at his piano." data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/wp-Marvin_At_Piano_60s_Marvin-at-Piano-by-1983-315x380.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2017/04/wp-Marvin_At_Piano_60s_Marvin-at-Piano-by-1983-630x760.jpg"></div>  </figure> <figure class="isotope-item ratio-container--gallery photo" data-category="photo" data-ratio="1.5322580645161" title="" data-gtm-category="photo" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever - ">   <div class="lazyload ratio-container__image" data-toggle="modal" data-target="#imageModal" data-image-src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/wp-Marvin_Minsky_and_Siblings_Pony_1933_Loose-Photos-Marvin-with-younger-and-older-sisters-on-Pony-Florida-1932-272-Print-Asset-1-refiled-as-MLLP685.jpg" data-image-caption="1933, Florida: Minsky and his younger sister, Ruth, riding a pony with their older sister, Charlotte, standing beside them. (Margaret Minsky)" data-image-copyright="wp-Marvin_Minsky_and_Siblings_Pony_1933_Loose Photos - Marvin with younger and older sisters on Pony - Florida - 1932 - 272 - Print Asset 1 refiled as - MLLP685" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/wp-Marvin_Minsky_and_Siblings_Pony_1933_Loose-Photos-Marvin-with-younger-and-older-sisters-on-Pony-Florida-1932-272-Print-Asset-1-refiled-as-MLLP685-248x380.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2017/04/wp-Marvin_Minsky_and_Siblings_Pony_1933_Loose-Photos-Marvin-with-younger-and-older-sisters-on-Pony-Florida-1932-272-Print-Asset-1-refiled-as-MLLP685-496x760.jpg"></div>  </figure> <figure class="isotope-item ratio-container--gallery photo" data-category="photo" data-ratio="1.0659186535764" title="" data-gtm-category="photo" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever - ">   <div class="lazyload ratio-container__image" data-toggle="modal" data-target="#imageModal" data-image-src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/wp-Marvin_Minsky_decade_of_1940_Father_made_tie_-Loose-SMALL-Prints-Marvin-Minsky-in-suit-perhaps-Henry-Minsky-painted-tie-MLLP101.jpg" data-image-caption="1940s: Marvin Minsky. (Margaret Minsky)" data-image-copyright="1940s: Marvin Minsky" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/wp-Marvin_Minsky_decade_of_1940_Father_made_tie_-Loose-SMALL-Prints-Marvin-Minsky-in-suit-perhaps-Henry-Minsky-painted-tie-MLLP101-357x380.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2017/04/wp-Marvin_Minsky_decade_of_1940_Father_made_tie_-Loose-SMALL-Prints-Marvin-Minsky-in-suit-perhaps-Henry-Minsky-painted-tie-MLLP101-713x760.jpg"></div>  </figure> <figure class="isotope-item ratio-container--gallery photo" data-category="photo" data-ratio="1.0160427807487" title="" data-gtm-category="photo" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever - ">   <div class="lazyload ratio-container__image" data-toggle="modal" data-target="#imageModal" data-image-src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/wp-MarvinPianoBowdoinLate50or60s.jpg" data-image-caption="Late 1950s: Marvin Minsky "was a musical improviser/composer prodigy as a child, and while he was becoming a scientist, he was a serious student of music.The 1960's and 1970's found him recording many contrapuntal improvisations on tape and sometimes editing them, as well as experimenting with new ways to play piano, the instrument he loves above all others. (Margaret Minsky)" data-image-copyright="wp-MarvinPianoBowdoinLate50or60s" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/wp-MarvinPianoBowdoinLate50or60s-374x380.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2017/04/wp-MarvinPianoBowdoinLate50or60s-748x760.jpg"></div>  </figure> <figure class="isotope-item ratio-container--gallery photo" data-category="photo" data-ratio="1.4048059149723" title="" data-gtm-category="photo" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever - ">   <div class="lazyload ratio-container__image" data-toggle="modal" data-target="#imageModal" data-image-src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/wp-Minsky-Loose-MEDIUM-Prints-Marvin-Minsky-Sailor-First-Class-1945-MLLP200.jpg" data-image-caption="1945: Marvin Minsky, Sailor First Class. Minsky served in the U.S. Navy from 1944 to 1945. (Margaret Minsky)" data-image-copyright="wp-Minsky Loose MEDIUM Prints - Marvin Minsky Sailor First Class - 1945 - MLLP200" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/wp-Minsky-Loose-MEDIUM-Prints-Marvin-Minsky-Sailor-First-Class-1945-MLLP200-271x380.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2017/04/wp-Minsky-Loose-MEDIUM-Prints-Marvin-Minsky-Sailor-First-Class-1945-MLLP200-541x760.jpg"></div>  </figure> <figure class="isotope-item ratio-container--gallery photo" data-category="photo" data-ratio="0.78684210526316" title="" data-gtm-category="photo" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever - ">   <div class="lazyload ratio-container__image" data-toggle="modal" data-target="#imageModal" data-image-src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/wp-Press-Photo-mailed-1982-08-16-Marvin-Minsky-with-Marg025.jpg" data-image-caption="1982: Marvin Minsky Press Photo (Margaret Minsky)" data-image-copyright="1982: Marvin Minsky Press Photo" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/wp-Press-Photo-mailed-1982-08-16-Marvin-Minsky-with-Marg025-380x299.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2017/04/wp-Press-Photo-mailed-1982-08-16-Marvin-Minsky-with-Marg025-760x598.jpg"></div>  </figure> <figure class="isotope-item ratio-container--gallery photo" data-category="photo" data-ratio="1.4615384615385" title="" data-gtm-category="photo" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever - ">   <div class="lazyload ratio-container__image" data-toggle="modal" data-target="#imageModal" data-image-src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/wp-processed-04-1978-Marvin-Minsky-holding-tape-reel-2.jpg" data-image-caption="April 1978: Marvin Minsky in his living room holding a tape reel. Minsky liked to record his musical improvisations on his reel-to-reel tape recorder. (Margaret Minsky)" data-image-copyright="wp-processed 04 1978 - Marvin Minsky holding tape reel 2" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/wp-processed-04-1978-Marvin-Minsky-holding-tape-reel-2-260x380.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2017/04/wp-processed-04-1978-Marvin-Minsky-holding-tape-reel-2-520x760.jpg"></div>  </figure> <figure class="isotope-item ratio-container--gallery photo" data-category="photo" data-ratio="1.4990138067061" title="" data-gtm-category="photo" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever - ">   <div class="lazyload ratio-container__image" data-toggle="modal" data-target="#imageModal" data-image-src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/wp-Marvin-Cover-Photo-New-York-Times-Magazine-Section_1980.jpg" data-image-caption="1980: Marvin Minsky on the cover of the New York Times magazine. (Margaret Minsky)" data-image-copyright="wp-Marvin-Cover-Photo-New-York-Times-Magazine-Section_1980" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/wp-Marvin-Cover-Photo-New-York-Times-Magazine-Section_1980-253x380.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2017/04/wp-Marvin-Cover-Photo-New-York-Times-Magazine-Section_1980-507x760.jpg"></div>  </figure> <figure class="isotope-item ratio-container--gallery photo" data-category="photo" data-ratio="0.62894736842105" title="" data-gtm-category="photo" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever - ">   <div class="lazyload ratio-container__image" data-toggle="modal" data-target="#imageModal" data-image-src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/wp-Lecture_Dartmouth_1960s__M_CJS-040-.jpg" data-image-caption="1960s: Marvin Minsky lecturing at Dartmouth College. (Margaret Minsky)" data-image-copyright="1960s: Marvin Minsky lecturing at Dartmouth College." data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/wp-Lecture_Dartmouth_1960s__M_CJS-040--380x239.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2017/04/wp-Lecture_Dartmouth_1960s__M_CJS-040--760x478.jpg"></div>  </figure> <figure class="isotope-item ratio-container--gallery photo" data-category="photo" data-ratio="0.99342105263158" title="" data-gtm-category="photo" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever - ">   <div class="lazyload ratio-container__image" data-toggle="modal" data-target="#imageModal" data-image-src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/wp-Belle_Harbor_Marvin_daughter_dog_c_1959_img027.jpg" data-image-caption="1959: Marvin Minsky with his dog, Sengie, and his daughter, Margaret, in Belle Harbor, New York. (Margaret Minsky)" data-image-copyright="wp-Belle_Harbor_Marvin_daughter_dog_c_1959_img027" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/wp-Belle_Harbor_Marvin_daughter_dog_c_1959_img027-380x378.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2017/04/wp-Belle_Harbor_Marvin_daughter_dog_c_1959_img027-760x755.jpg"></div>  </figure> <figure class="isotope-item ratio-container--gallery photo" data-category="photo" data-ratio="0.81315789473684" title="" data-gtm-category="photo" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever - ">   <div class="lazyload ratio-container__image" data-toggle="modal" data-target="#imageModal" data-image-src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/wp-Marvin_Gloria_Wedding_1952_Marvin-Minsky_-with-Marg018.jpg" data-image-caption="In 1952, Marvin Minksy married Gloria Rudisch, a pediatrician. They had three children: Henry, Juliana, and Margaret. (Margaret Minsky)" data-image-copyright="wp-Marvin_Gloria_Wedding_1952_Marvin Minsky_ with Marg018" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/wp-Marvin_Gloria_Wedding_1952_Marvin-Minsky_-with-Marg018-380x309.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2017/03/wp-Marvin_Gloria_Wedding_1952_Marvin-Minsky_-with-Marg018-760x618.jpg"></div>  </figure> <figure class="isotope-item ratio-container--gallery photo" data-category="photo" data-ratio="0.79210526315789" title="" data-gtm-category="photo" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever - ">   <div class="lazyload ratio-container__image" data-toggle="modal" data-target="#imageModal" data-image-src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/wp-Marvin-Minsky-Claude-Shannon-Ray-Solomonoff-Plus-2-Dartmouth-1956-Conference.jpg" data-image-caption="1956: Marvin Minsky with Claude Shannon, Ray Solomonoff and other scientists attending the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence. The 1956 summer workshop, now considered by many, to be the seminal event for artificial intelligence as a field. (Margaret Minsky)" data-image-copyright="wp-Marvin Minsky - Claude Shannon - Ray Solomonoff - Plus 2 - Dartmouth 1956 Conference" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/wp-Marvin-Minsky-Claude-Shannon-Ray-Solomonoff-Plus-2-Dartmouth-1956-Conference-380x301.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2017/03/wp-Marvin-Minsky-Claude-Shannon-Ray-Solomonoff-Plus-2-Dartmouth-1956-Conference-760x602.jpg"></div>  </figure> <figure class="isotope-item ratio-container--gallery photo" data-category="photo" data-ratio="1.2438625204583" title="" data-gtm-category="photo" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever - ">   <div class="lazyload ratio-container__image" data-toggle="modal" data-target="#imageModal" data-image-src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/wp2-Marvin_Minsky_c_1970-Marvin-Minsky-Block-Blocks-Vision-Robot-MIT-MLLP089.jpg" data-image-caption="1968: Marvin Minsky with Block Blocks Vision Robot at MIT. Minsky Harvard University after returning from service in the U.S. Navy during World War II. After graduating from Harvard with honors in 1950, he attended Princeton University, receiving his Ph.D. in mathematics in 1954. In 1951, his first year at Princeton, he built the first neural network simulator. Minsky joined the faculty of MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in 1958, and co-founded the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (now the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory) in 1959. (Margaret Minsky)" data-image-copyright="wp2-Marvin_Minsky_c_1970- Marvin Minsky - Block Blocks Vision Robot MIT- MLLP089" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/wp2-Marvin_Minsky_c_1970-Marvin-Minsky-Block-Blocks-Vision-Robot-MIT-MLLP089-305x380.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2017/03/wp2-Marvin_Minsky_c_1970-Marvin-Minsky-Block-Blocks-Vision-Robot-MIT-MLLP089-611x760.jpg"></div>  </figure> <figure class="isotope-item ratio-container--gallery photo" data-category="photo" data-ratio="0.65131578947368" title="" data-gtm-category="photo" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever - ">   <div class="lazyload ratio-container__image" data-toggle="modal" data-target="#imageModal" data-image-src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/wp3-combine2-etMarvin-as-Young-Boy-c.jpg" data-image-caption="Left: Marvin Minsky as a young boy (c. 1937-1940). Right: Marvin Minksy in High School (c. 1970). (Margaret Minsky)" data-image-copyright="wp3-combine2-etMarvin-as-Young-Boy-c" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/wp3-combine2-etMarvin-as-Young-Boy-c-380x247.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2017/03/wp3-combine2-etMarvin-as-Young-Boy-c-760x495.jpg"></div>  </figure> <figure class="isotope-item ratio-container--gallery photo" data-category="photo" data-ratio="0.67105263157895" title="" data-gtm-category="photo" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever - ">   <div class="lazyload ratio-container__image" data-toggle="modal" data-target="#imageModal" data-image-src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/wp-Marvin-Minksy-and-Leon-Lederman-2001-Summit-San-Antonio.jpg" data-image-caption="Marvin Minsky, pioneer of artificial intelligence, and Leon Lederman, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics, exchange ideas between symposiums at the 2001 American Academy of Achievement in San Antonio, Texas." data-image-copyright="wp-Marvin Minksy and Leon Lederman - 2001 Summit San Antonio" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/wp-Marvin-Minksy-and-Leon-Lederman-2001-Summit-San-Antonio-380x255.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2017/03/wp-Marvin-Minksy-and-Leon-Lederman-2001-Summit-San-Antonio-760x510.jpg"></div>  </figure>    </div> </section> </div> </div> <div class="container"> <footer class="editorial-article__footer col-md-8 col-md-offset-4"> <div class="editorial-article__next-link sans-3"> <a href="#"><strong>What's next:</strong> <span class="editorial-article__next-link-title">profile</span></a> </div> <ul class="social list-unstyled list-inline ssk-group m-b-0"> <li class="list-inline-item"><a href="" class="ssk ssk-facebook" data-gtm-category="social" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Shared Achiever on Facebook"><i class="icon-icon_facebook-circle"></i></a></li> <li class="list-inline-item"><a href="" class="ssk ssk-twitter" data-gtm-category="social" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Shared 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Fauci, M.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/sally-field/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Sally Field</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/lord-norman-foster/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Lord Norman Foster</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/aretha-franklin/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Aretha Franklin</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/milton-friedman-ph-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Milton Friedman, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/carlos-fuentes/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Carlos Fuentes</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/athol-fugard/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Athol Fugard</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/ernest-j-gaines/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Ernest J. Gaines</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/william-h-gates-iii/"><span class="achiever-list-name">William H. Gates III</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/leymah-gbowee/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Leymah Gbowee</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/frank-gehry/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Frank O. Gehry</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/murray-gell-mann-ph-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Murray Gell-Mann, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/carlos-ghosn/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Carlos Ghosn</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/vince-gill/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Vince Gill</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/ruth-bader-ginsburg/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Ruth Bader Ginsburg</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/louise-gluck/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Louise Glück</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/whoopi-goldberg/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Whoopi Goldberg</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/jane-goodall/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Dame Jane Goodall</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/doris-kearns-goodwin/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Doris Kearns Goodwin, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/mikhail-s-gorbachev/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Mikhail S. Gorbachev</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/nadine-gordimer/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Nadine Gordimer</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/stephen-jay-gould/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Stephen Jay Gould, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/carol-greider-ph-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Carol Greider, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/john-grisham/"><span class="achiever-list-name">John Grisham</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/sir-john-gurdon/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Sir John Gurdon</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/dorothy-hamill/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Dorothy Hamill</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/demis-hassabis-ph-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Demis Hassabis, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/lauryn-hill/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Lauryn Hill</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/sir-edmund-hillary/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Sir Edmund Hillary</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/reid-hoffman/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Reid Hoffman</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/khaled-hosseini/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Khaled Hosseini, M.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/ron-howard/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Ron Howard</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/john-hume/"><span class="achiever-list-name">John Hume</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/louis-ignarro-ph-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Louis Ignarro, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/daniel-inouye/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Daniel K. Inouye</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/jeremy-irons/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Jeremy Irons</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/john-irving/"><span class="achiever-list-name">John Irving</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/kazuo-ishiguro/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Kazuo Ishiguro</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/sir-peter-jackson/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Sir Peter Jackson</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/donald-c-johanson/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Donald C. Johanson, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/frank-m-johnson/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Frank M. Johnson, Jr.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/philip-johnson/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Philip C. Johnson</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/chuck-jones/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Chuck Jones</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/james-earl-jones/"><span class="achiever-list-name">James Earl Jones</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/quincy-jones/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Quincy Jones</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/beverly-joubert/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Beverly Joubert</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/dereck-joubert/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Dereck Joubert</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/paul-kagame/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Paul Kagame</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/thomas-keller-2/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Thomas Keller</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/anthony-m-kennedy/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Anthony M. Kennedy</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/b-b-king/"><span class="achiever-list-name">B.B. King</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/carole-king/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Carole King</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/coretta-scott-king/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Coretta Scott King</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/henry-kissinger-ph-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Henry A. Kissinger, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/willem-j-kolff/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Willem J. Kolff, M.D., Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/wendy-kopp/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Wendy Kopp</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/henry-r-kravis/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Henry R. Kravis</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/nicholas-d-kristof/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Nicholas D. Kristof</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/mike-krzyzewski/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Mike Krzyzewski</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/ray-kurzwell/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Ray Kurzweil</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/eric-lander-ph-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Eric S. Lander, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/robert-s-langer-ph-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Robert S. Langer, Sc.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/richard-leakey/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Richard E. Leakey</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/leon-lederman-ph-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Leon Lederman, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/robert-lefkowitz-m-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Robert J. Lefkowitz, M.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/congressman-john-r-lewis/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Congressman John R. Lewis</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/maya-lin/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Maya Lin</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/george-lucas/"><span class="achiever-list-name">George Lucas</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/norman-mailer/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Norman Mailer</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/peyton-manning/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Peyton Manning</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/wynton-marsalis/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Wynton Marsalis</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/john-c-mather-ph-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">John C. Mather, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/johnny-mathis/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Johnny Mathis</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/ernst-mayr-ph-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Ernst Mayr, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/willie-mays/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Willie Mays</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/frank-mccourt/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Frank McCourt</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/david-mccullough/"><span class="achiever-list-name">David McCullough</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/audra-mcdonald/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Audra McDonald</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/admiral-william-h-mcraven/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Admiral William H. McRaven, USN</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/w-s-merwin/"><span class="achiever-list-name">W. S. Merwin</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/james-a-michener/"><span class="achiever-list-name">James A. Michener</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/marvin-minsky-ph-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Marvin Minsky, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/mario-j-molina-ph-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Mario J. Molina, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/n-scott-momaday-ph-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">N. Scott Momaday, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/story-musgrave/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Story Musgrave, M.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/ralph-nader/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Ralph Nader</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/peggy-noonan/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Peggy Noonan</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/jessye-norman/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Jessye Norman</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/tommy-norris/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Lt. Thomas R. Norris, USN</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/joyce-carol-oates/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Joyce Carol Oates</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/pierre-omidyar/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Pierre Omidyar</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/jimmy-page/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Jimmy Page</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/larry-page/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Larry Page</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/arnold-palmer/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Arnold Palmer</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/leon-panetta/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Leon Panetta</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/rosa-parks/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Rosa Parks</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/suzan-lori-parks/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Suzan-Lori Parks</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/linus-pauling/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Linus C. Pauling, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/shimon-peres/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Shimon Peres</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/itzhak-perlman/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Itzhak Perlman</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/general-david-petraeus/"><span class="achiever-list-name">General David H. Petraeus, USA</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/sidney-poitier/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Sidney Poitier</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/general-colin-l-powell/"><span class="achiever-list-name">General Colin L. Powell, USA</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/harold-prince/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Harold Prince</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/venki-ramakrishnan-ph-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Venki Ramakrishnan, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/lord-martin-rees/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Lord Martin Rees</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/lloyd-richards/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Lloyd Richards</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/sally-ride-ph-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Sally K. Ride, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/sonny-rollins/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Sonny Rollins</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/anthony-romero/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Anthony Romero</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/james-rosenquist/"><span class="achiever-list-name">James Rosenquist</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/pete-rozelle/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Pete Rozelle</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/bill-russell/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Bill Russell</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/albie-sachs/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Albie Sachs</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/oliver-sacks-m-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Oliver Sacks, M.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/jonas-salk-m-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Jonas Salk, M.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/frederick-sanger-ph-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Frederick Sanger, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/george-b-schaller-ph-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">George B. Schaller, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/barry-scheck/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Barry Scheck</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/richard-evans-schultes-ph-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Richard Evans Schultes, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/general-h-norman-schwarzkopf/"><span class="achiever-list-name">General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, USA</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/stephen-schwarzman/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Stephen A. Schwarzman</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/glenn-t-seaborg-ph-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Glenn T. Seaborg, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/neil-sheehan/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Neil Sheehan</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/admiral-alan-shepard-jr/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Admiral Alan B. Shepard, Jr., USN</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/ellen-johnson-sirleaf/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Ellen Johnson Sirleaf</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/carlos-slim/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Carlos Slim Helú</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/frederick-w-smith/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Frederick W. Smith</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/stephen-sondheim/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Stephen Sondheim</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/sonia-sotomayor/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Sonia Sotomayor</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/wole-soyinka/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Wole Soyinka</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/esperanza-spalding/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Esperanza Spalding</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/martha-stewart/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Martha Stewart</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/admiral-james-b-stockdale/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Admiral James B. Stockdale, USN</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/hilary-swank/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Hilary Swank</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/amy-tan/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Amy Tan</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/dame-kiri-te-kanawa/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Dame Kiri Te Kanawa</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/edward-teller-ph-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Edward Teller, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/twyla-tharp/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Twyla Tharp</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/wayne-thiebaud/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Wayne Thiebaud</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/lt-michael-e-thornton-usn/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Lt. Michael E. Thornton, USN</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190115051330/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/charles-h-townes-ph-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Charles H. 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