Short answers, pulled from the story.
Marvin Minsky invented the first head-mounted graphical display in 1963, the confocal microscope in 1957, and the first randomly wired neural network learning machine called SNARC in 1951. Working with Seymour Papert, he also developed the first Logo programming language-driven turtle robot.
Minsky won the ACM Turing Award in 1969, the Japan Prize in 1990, the Benjamin Franklin Medal in 2001, and the Dan David Prize for "Artificial Intelligence, the Digital Mind" in 2014. He was also elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 1973 and the U.S. National Academy of Engineering in 1989.
The Society of Mind theory describes intelligence as the possible product of the interaction of non-intelligent parts. Minsky and Seymour Papert developed it at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab in the early 1970s, and Minsky published a book on the theory for a general audience in 1986.
Minsky served as an adviser to director Stanley Kubrick on the film. One of the film's characters, Victor Kaminski, was named in his honor. Arthur C. Clarke's novel of the same name also mentions Minsky by name as having achieved a breakthrough in artificial intelligence.
Perceptrons, published in 1969, attacked Frank Rosenblatt's work on perceptrons and analyzed the limitations of artificial neural networks. Some historians argue the book greatly discouraged neural network research in the 1970s and contributed to the so-called AI winter.
Marvin Minsky died on the 24th of January 2016 in Boston, Massachusetts, aged 88. His family reported that he died of a cerebral hemorrhage.