Seymour Papert

Biography

South African-born American mathematician and computer scientist, born in Pretoria in 1928. He took a doctorate in mathematics at the University of the Witwatersrand in 1952 and a second at Cambridge in 1960. He worked with Jean Piaget in Geneva from 1958 to 1963, then moved to MIT, where he served as co-director of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory from 1967 to 1981 and founded the Epistemology and Learning Research Group, which grew into the MIT Media Lab. With Wally Feurzeig and Cynthia Solomon he co-invented the Logo programming language, and with Marvin Minsky he wrote Perceptrons (1969). Mindstorms (1980) set out his theory of constructionism. He died in Maine in 2016.