Marvin Minsky

Marvin Minsky is Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Sciences and Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. Minsky has been a leading figure in computer science for over five decades. He is one of the deepest thinkers in the field of artificial intelligence, a domain he co-founded with John McCarthy (CHM Fellow, 1999), by establishing, in 1959, what would become the MIT AI Lab. A mathematician by training, his work has applied computational concepts to the understanding of human psychological processes. This work has been widely influential, as have his parallel efforts in endowing machines with intelligence. Minsky holds a B.A. (Harvard, 1949) and Ph.D. (Princeton, 1954), both in Mathematics. In 1952, he married Dr. Gloria Rudisch, a pediatrician. They moved to Greater Boston when he returned to Harvard as a junior fellow, and he later began working at MIT. Born in New York City, Dr. Minsky grew up in Manhattan and the Bronx. He was the middle child and only son of Dr. Henry Minsky, an eye surgeon, and the former Fannie Reiser, a Jewish activist. He attended the progressive Fieldston School and then went to the Bronx High School of Science, until his parents sent him to Phillips Academy in Andover his senior year to increase his chances of getting into a top university. After high school, at 17, he enlisted in the Navy at the end of World War II and briefly was sent to the Midwest for electronics training in 1945. When the war was done, he went to Harvard, from which he graduated in 1950 with a bachelor’s in mathematics. He received his doctorate, also in mathematics, from Princeton in 1954. In addition to his wife, Dr. Minsky leaves two daughters, Margaret of Greenfield and Juliana of Santa Barbara, Calif.; a son, Henry of Newton; a sister, Ruth Amster of New York City; and four grandchildren.