Minsky really made me as a person. He was my adviser when I was a student at MIT, and he got me my first job. He had the "magnetism" to attract the most talented people to MIT to work on AI, and the right amount of negligence and delegation to create an environment where people could thrive. He is certainly the reason that I was seduced into working on AI. Minsky has vast and deep Scientific knowledge – he could walk into almost any class: Chemistry, Physics, Math, Computer Science, and teach the class well without preparation!

–Prof. Sussman

• http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/ Much of Minsky's work is here, including his book, The Emotion Machine, and several essays and papers. Check it out!
• Society of Mind Read it online! Each chapter of this book is a short, self-contained essay about some aspect of intelligence or development.
• Music, Mind, and Meaning Minsky is one of a few living people who can improvise complicated Baroque era fugues. You can hear one of these improvisations here.
• Steps towards Artificial Intelligence Here, Minsky outlines how we might begin to build an AI. This is considered to be one of the founding papers of the field, along with Turing's "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" paper.
• Perceptrons, by Marvin Minsky
  • MIT Press, ISBN: 9780262631112
  • Really good for "Math types."
  • Uses geometry for proving things.
  • People unwisely considered it to kill off Neural Nets; In fact, it only shows the limitations of certain simple kinds of Neural Nets.