Marvin Minsky, the pioneering artificial intelligence theorist, died of cerebral hemorrhage Sunday (January 24) at the age of 88 at a hospital in Boston. Apart from being the founding father of the field of artificial intelligence, Minsky was, during his long tenure as professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an innovative explorer of the mysteries of the human mind.

Born in New York City on August 9, 1927, Minsky’s father Henry was a noted eye surgeon who served as director of Mount Sinai Hospital’s ophthalmology department in Manhattan. His mother, the former Fannie Reiser, was active in Zionist causes.

The MIT’s Media Lab that he headed had a broad, interdisciplinary mandate to explore technology, multimedia and design.

Dr. Minsky was a devoted professional who flourished as a professor and mentor. During his career, he delved on astonishing hypothesis that engineers could someday create an intelligent machine.

In his youth, Dr. Minsky developed a microscope for analyzing brain tissue that eventually became a standard tool for scientists.

Dr. Minsky believed the word “intelligence” was a suitcase word because one can stuff a lot of ideas into it. Other such words include creativity and emotion, he believed. He developed a concept of intelligence as something that emerged from disparate mental agents acting in coordination. No single agent is intelligent when operating alone.

His seminal books “The Society of Mind” (1986) and “The Emotion Machine” (2006) are considered by colleagues as essential to understanding the challenges in creating machine intelligence.

Dr. Minsky’s colleague Nicholas Negroponte writes: “The world has lost one of its greatest minds in science. As a founding faculty member of the Media Lab he brought equal measures of humour and deep thinking, always seeing the world differently. He taught us that the difficult is often easy, but the easy can be really hard”.