Marvin Lee Minsky is the co-founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and the Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Sciences and Professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT. Minsky is heralded as the "Father of Artificial Intelligence." He earned his degree in mathematics at Harvard in 1950 and his doctorate from Princeton in 1954. Minsky's inventions include the first head-mounted graphical display, and the confocal microscope (a predecessor to today's widely used confocal laser scanning microscope), and the first randomly wired neural network learning machine, SNARC. In the early 1970s, Minsky and Seymour Papert developed what came to be called The Society of Mind theory, which explained how intelligence could be a product of the interaction of non-intelligent parts. Minsky is one of the most influential leaders in the computer science community, where for fifty years, he has attempted to unveil the exciting real promise of artificial intelligence to extend mankind's intellect further than was ever dreamed. In the early 1980s, The New York Times described him as a Twentieth-Century Renaissance Man. Marvin Minsky participated in the 1982 Achievement Summit at New Orleans, and spoke to the student delegates about the new computer revolution and his philosophy of "life as a fact-finding mission."