Seymour Papert

Name: Seymour Papert

Born: February 29, 1928, in Pretoria, South Africa

Death: July 31, 2016 (Age: 88)

Computer-related contributions

• Computer scientist, and professor of mathematics at MIT.
• One of the pioneers of artificial intelligence.
• Inventor of the Logo programming language.

Significant publications

• The Connected Family: Bridging the Digital Generation Gap (1996).
• The Children's Machine: Rethinking School in the Age of the Computer (1993).
• Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas (1980).
• Counter-free automata (1971).
• Perceptrons (1969).

Honors and awards

• Smithsonian Award from Computerworld (1997).
• Software Publishers Association Lifetime Achievement Award (1994).
• Marconi International fellowship (1981).
• Guggenheim fellowship (1980).
• Called "the greatest living mathematics educator" by Marvin Minsky.

Quotes

"The role of the teacher is to create the conditions for invention rather than provide ready-made knowledge."