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Faculty Profiles

Seymour Papert
Seymour Papert
Professor of Education and Media Technology, Emeritus
Group: Future of Learning
Office: E15-319
Phone: (617) 253-7854
Fax: (617) 258-6264
E-mail: papert@media
addresses are formatted username@media.mit.edu
URL: http://www.media.mit.edu/~papert
 

Biography

A mathematician by training, Seymour Papert was one of the early pioneers of artificial intelligence. He is also internationally recognized as the seminal thinker regarding computers and pedagogy for children. His collaboration with Jean Piaget at the University of Geneva led him to consider using mathematics to help understand how children can learn and think. In the early 1960s, Papert came to MIT, where, with Marvin Minsky, he founded the Artificial Intelligence Lab and co-authored their seminal work Perceptrons. With former Governor of Maine Angus King, he worked on the Maine Learning Technology Initiative, a program that provided a laptop for every middle-school student in Maine. He is the author of Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas; The Children's Machine: Rethinking School in the Age of the Computer; and The Connected Family: Bridging the Digital Generation Gap. He has also written numerous articles about mathematics, artificial intelligence, education, learning, and thinking. Born and educated in South Africa, Papert was an active participant in the anti-apartheid movement.


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