Seymour A. Papert

Seymour Papert was a South African-born American mathematician, computer scientist, and educator who spent most of his career teaching and researching at MIT. He was one of the pioneers of artificial intelligence and of the constructionist movement in education.

For his last 20 years of life, Papert lived in Maine, where he had founded a small laboratory called the Learning Barn, where his vision was "to develop methods of learning that are too far ahead of the times for large-scale implementation." Papert has been named a distinguished professor by the University of Maine and is credited with inspiring governor King for the first statewide initiative aimed at giving a personal computer to every student of a state. In the late 90s, he spent a large part of his time working in the Maine Youth Center in Portland, the state's facility for teenagers convicted of serious offenses, to teach them the most important skills -- learning and thinking.