Curated category
Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty
- Marvin MinskyMarvin Minsky once described intelligence as the possible product of the interaction of non-intelligent parts. That idea alone reshaped how scientists and…
- Hilary PutnamHilary Putnam was a philosopher who changed his mind for a living. He arrived at Harvard in 1965, organized campus protests, taught courses on Marxism, and…
- Edward FredkinEdward Fredkin was born on the 2nd of October 1934 to Russian-Jewish immigrants in Los Angeles. His mother worked as a concert pianist but never performed…
- Joseph WeizenbaumJoseph Weizenbaum built one of the most unsettling programs in the history of computing, and it unsettled him most of all.
- Oliver SelfridgeOliver Selfridge was born on the 10th of May 1926 into a family that already knew something about building things people would remember.
- Susan AtheySusan Athey grew up watching her father, Whit Athey, work as a physics scholar, while her mother Elizabeth Johansen edited texts and taught English.
- John McCarthy (computer scientist)John McCarthy coined the term "artificial intelligence" in the summer of 1956, and spent the rest of his life trying to build exactly what that phrase…
- Rodney BrooksRodney Allen Brooks was born on the 30th of December 1954 in Australia. He began his academic journey studying pure mathematics at Flinders University of…
- Gary GenslerSam Gensler walked into a Baltimore bar with his son Gary in 1970. He handed the boy a handful of nickels from a pinball machine.
- Daniel Patrick MoynihanDaniel Patrick Moynihan shined shoes at Pennsylvania Station as a boy during the Great Depression, in the same building he would later spend decades fighting…
- Edward Jay EpsteinEdward Jay Epstein died in his Manhattan apartment on the 9th of January 2024, at 88 years old, from COVID-19. He had spent more than half a century making…