Marvin Minsky - The small math community at Princeton (31/151)

To hear more of Marvin Minsky’s stories, go to the playlist: • Marvin Minsky - The am...
The scientist, Marvin Minsky (1927-2016) was one of the pioneers of the field of Artificial Intelligence, having founded the MIT AI Lab in 1970. Since the 1950s, his work involved trying to uncover human thinking processes and replicate them in machines. [Listener: Christopher Sykes; date recorded: 2011]
TRANSCRIPT: There wasn’t such a community… I was at Princeton from 1951 to '54, and I was part of a community that indeed met every day, pretty much, because in the math department at Princeton there was a common room, and the total number of students was rather small; they admitted maybe six or seven per year, and people would stay four or five years or more, so there was maybe 30 graduate students and 10 professors, which was a rather remarkable ratio, and so almost all the students knew almost all the other students and professors, and we almost all were hanging around this common room which was fairly big, and every day, pretty much.
And I would spend most of my time talking to John Nash and Lloyd Shapley and Martin Shubik and Herb Forrester and three or four other mathematicians with different interests, and some of the professors, and when something came up we would talk about it; and then the next day or two, somebody might have made some real progress, or everybody decided it was a waste of time, and... so that was a small community.

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I do small math.