Seymour Papert

Cocreator of the Logo programming language and theorist in artificial intelligence

• Born: March 1, 1928
• Birthplace: Pretoria, South Africa

Primary Company/Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Introduction

Mathematician Seymour Papert developed the Logo programming language, a dialect of Lisp, which is used mainly to teach programming concepts. He is also a prominent theorist in the field of artificial intelligence, serving as a faculty member in of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) from 1967 to 1981. His work has long been concerned with theories of learning and with child development, and he was instrumental in the One Laptop Per Child project, which seeks to provide low-cost educational computers to children in developing nations.

Early Life

Seymour Papert was born in Pretoria, South Africa, on February 29, 1928 (a leap year). He attended university in Johannesburg, earning a B.A. and Ph.D. in mathematics in 1949 and 1952, respectively, before leaving the country to work and study abroad. While in London studying at Cambridge University (from which he was awarded another Ph.D. in mathematics in 1959), he was a prominent member of the socialist group that published the Socialist Review, which began publication in 1950.

Life's Work

From 1959 to 1963, Papert worked as a researcher at a wide variety of institutions: the National Physical Laboratory (London), St. John's College (Cambridge), the University of Geneva, and the Henri Poincaré Institute (Paris). In 1963, he relocated to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to take a job as a research associate at MIT. He became part of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, which formed at MIT in 1970.

Papert worked closely with Marvin Minsky, who had joined MIT's faculty in 1958 and became the first director of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory when it formed in 1970 as a separate entity spun off from the computer science lab's Project on Mathematics and Computation (Project MAC). Minsky worked with Papert and Wally Feurzeig on the creation of the Logo programming language. Based on Lisp, Logo was intended to allow users to write programs that would perform simple tasks and to produce helpful error messages when a program was written or executed incorrectly. Although associated now with “virtual” turtles (cursors that move on the screen according to the Logo program's instructions and were originally meant for debugging), actual physical “turtles,” robots designed for use with Logo, were built in 1969, originally tethered to the floor by a cord, but later controlled wirelessly. The turtle has a “pen” that can draw a line using commands such as PENUP, PENDOWN, and PENERASE.

Papert's work on Logo was influenced by the theories of Jean Piaget on the psychology of child development. Papert had worked with Piaget at Geneva, and Piaget called him the best of his protégés. Logo is an educational programming language that teaches basic programming concepts while allowing students to create programs with demonstrable, tangible results and understandable errors. Beginning in 1970 at Bridge School in Lexington, Massachusetts, Logo software and turtle robots were provided to classrooms. Since then, classrooms have more commonly used only the virtual turtles of the display screen, and Logo has been a popular part of public school curricula. In many states, a unit on the Logo language was part of the state-mandated computer literacy requirement, chosen in favor of similar novitiate languages such as BASIC and the later VisualBasic. Minsky's contribution was to collaborate on the construction of the turtle robot itself. The language was the work of Papert and Feurzeig.

Papert has continued to promote Logo (and the Logo Foundation research group), not only as a tool for introducing programming concepts to children but also as a means of strengthening their cognitive capacities and learning skills. Papert is also a proponent of constructing programming languages that can be used simultaneously to teach novices and offer more complicated functionality in order to be a practical language choice for real programming—rather than expect novice programmers to learn new languages as they progress.

Papert and other members of the Logo development team at MIT formed Logo Computer Systems, Inc., with Papert serving as chairman of the board of directors until 2002. There is no single Logo language definition, and there are many differences among the 197 different Logo variants and implementations. Furthermore, some programs inaccurately refer to themselves as Logo variants because they deal with turtle graphics. Recent variants of Logo support multiple turtles, Lego brick interfaces (though Logo is not the language used in the commercial Lego Mindstorms product), and the ability to create animated GIF image files. The StarLogo implementation, developed at MIT, supports thousands of turtles for the purpose of studying emergent phenomena.

Papert and Minsky also developed the theory of natural intelligence, which Minsky dubbed as “the society of mind” in a book of the same name. The model developed out of Minsky's work using a computer with a video camera and a robotic arm to manipulate Legos, and it describes human intelligence as the congregation of mindless parts called agents. The interactions among these agents creates the mind. The theory is purely conceptual, talking about the mind rather than the brain: Minsky is famous for his formulation that “the mind is what the brain does.”

In 1969, Minsky and Papert collaborated on Perceptrons: An Introduction to Computational Geometry, which was significantly expanded for a 1987 release. The perceptron of the title is an artificial neural network developed in the 1950s. The book made fairly pessimistic predictions about the success of artificial intelligence, and as the field failed to achieve many of the accomplishments it set out for itself, the book was subsequently blamed for changing the direction of research. However, two of the major setbacks in artificial intelligence research—the failure of machine translation and the field's abandonment of connectionism—occurred in the 1960s, well before the book was widely distributed. The twenty-first century has seen a significant increase in interest in artificial intelligence, albeit in very different directions from what was pursued in the 1960s and 1970s in the wake of developments since then in neuroscience and theories of cognition.

Papert's work often talked about a hypothetical device called the Knowledge Machine. The Knowledge Machine is a device or environment that allows children to engage actively with the learning experience and explore any situation. The idea is often invoked when discussing the educational potential of virtual reality and immersive simulations.

Also at MIT, Papert worked with the MIT Architecture Machine Group (AMG), the precursor to the Media Lab, which was created in 1985. Within the AMG, Papert created and led the Epistemology and Learning Research Group, developing the theory of constructionism, a theory of learning based on Piaget's work and his own theory of constructivism. In Papert's words, constructionism says that learning is most effective “when part of an activity the learner experiences is constructing a meaningful product.” This is the underlying goal of Logo, after all: to teach programming not through simple drills but by designing a language simple enough that children can be expected to write programs that have results they can witness and understand.

In his later life, Papert became involved with the One Laptop Per Child project, which spun out of work at the MIT Media Lab and was spearheaded by Nicholas P. Negroponte. The project seeks to develop low-cost (under $100), durable, low-power educational laptops (and perhaps tablets) for use by children in developing countries. The use of computers in education is among Papert's passions, one he has pursued his entire professional life. Papert retired from the MIT faculty in 1996.

Following his retirement from MIT, Papert moved to coastal Maine and continued to work to provide computers and model education to students. He worked with Governor Angus King on an initiative to provide all seventh and eighth grade students in Maine public school with computers. He also worked with a juvenile detention center in South Portland, Maine, called the Maine Youth Center to develop models of future school systems. He also established the Learning Lab and Learning Barn in Maine to give troubled students a place to learn.

Personal Life

Papert was married four times. As of 2012, he was married to Suzanne Massie Papert, the American author whose histories of Russia led to her informal participation in U.S.-Soviet diplomacy during the presidency of Ronald Reagan. Papert's third wife, Sherry Turkle, is an MIT professor who has written extensively on the social studies of science and human-computer interactions.

While attending a conference in Hanoi, Vietnam, in 2006, the then seventy-eight-year-old Papert was hit by a motorcycle and hospitalized. Brain surgery removed a dangerous blood clot that had formed, and after many strings were pulled, Papert was transferred by a specialized Swiss Air Ambulance (complete with an on-board intensive care unit) from Vietnam to Boston, Massachusetts, where he was processed through customs immediately thanks to the intervention of Massachusetts senator John Kerry. After a month at Massachusetts General Hospital, Papert was transferred to a hospital in his home state of Maine, where he continued to receive treatment. His initial injuries led to further complications: septicemia and the need for a heart valve operation. Two years later, he had recovered most of his faculties, but he has continued to work with a rehabilitation team on a lingering speech difficulty. Minsky has called Papert the greatest living mathematics educator.

Seymour Papert passed away on July 31, 2016, from complications from bladder and kidney infections. He was eighty-eight years old.

Bibliography

"About Seymour Papert." Daily Papert. Daily Papert, 2015. Web. 25 Sept. 2015.

Blikstein, Paulo. "Seymour Papert's Legacy: Thinking About Learning, and Learning About Thinking." Transformative Learning Technologies Lab. Stanford Graduate School of Education, 2013. Web. 25 Sept. 2015.

Kaiser, David. Becoming MIT: Moments of Decision. Cambridge: MIT, 2010. Print.

Moss, Frank. The Sorcerers and Their Apprentices: How the Digital Magicians of the MIT Media Lab Are Creating the Innovative Technologies that Will Transform Their Lives. New York: Crown, 2011. Print.

Papert, Seymour. The Children's Machine: Rethinking School in the Age of the Computer. New York: Basic, 1993. Print.

Rifkin, Glenn. "Seymour Papert, 88, Dies; Saw Education's Future in Computers." New York Times. New York Times, 1 Aug. 2016. Web. 20 Sept. 2016.