Biography
Marvin Lee Minsky (August 9, 1927 – January 24, 2016) was an American cognitive and computer scientist concerned largely with research in artificial intelligence (AI). He co-founded the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 's AI laboratory and wrote extensively about AI and philosophy. [ 12 ] [ 13 ] [ 14 ] [ 15 ] Minsky received many accolades and honors, including the 1969 ACM Turing Award . He is one of the people, most notably including John McCarthy , who have been considered "fathers of AI", [ 16 ] specifically due to his participation in the 1956 Dartmouth workshop that started Artificial Intelligence as an academic field. Marvin Lee Minsky was born in New York City, to Henry, an eye surgeon , and Fannie (Reiser), a Zionist activist. [ 15 ] [ 17 ] [ 18 ] His family was Jewish. He attended the Ethical Culture Fieldston School and the Bronx High School of Science . He later attended Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts . He then served in the US Navy from 1944 to 1945. He received a B.A. in mathematics from Harvard University in 1950 and a Ph.D. in mathematics from Princeton University in 1954. His doctoral dissertation was titled "Theory of neural-analog reinforcement systems and its application to the brain-model problem." [ 19 ] [ 20 ] [ 21 ] He was a Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows from 1954 to 1957. [ 22 ] [ 23 ] Fields: Cognitive science, Computer science, Artificial intelligence, Philosophy of mind Education: Harvard University BA Princeton University MA PhD Award Citation: Turing Award (1969) Japan Prize (1990) AAAI Fellow (1990) [ 1 ] IJCAI Award for Research Excellence (1991) Benjamin Franklin Medal (2001) BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award (2013)
About the Turing Award
The ACM A.M. Turing Award is an annual prize given by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for contributions of lasting and major technical importance to computer science. It is generally recognized as the highest distinction in computer science and is colloquially known as the "Nobel Prize of Computing."
Quick Facts
- Award: ACM A.M. Turing Award
- Added: 2026-02-07
- Source: Wikipedia
- Prize: $1,000,000 (USD)
- Presented by: ACM
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Notable Winners
- Donald Knuth (1974)
- Tim Berners-Lee (2016)
- Geoffrey Hinton (2018)
- Yoshua Bengio (2018)
- Yann LeCun (2018)