On December 7, AP reported from Hanoi, Vietnam, that "Seymour Papert, an MIT professor emeritus and internationally known expert in technology and learning, was severely injured in a traffic accident and remains in a coma".
On December 17, Papert, aged 78, was flown back to Boston, "along with family members, a nurse and a neurologist," according to the Taipei Times. He is still in intensive care.
Papert was a co-founder of MIT's Artificial Intelligence Lab, developed the Logo language (which can drive "turtles"), and is an adviser on the One Laptop Per Child project. The Boston Herald has a good story, which says:
Like bees, Hanoi motorbikes move in swarms, unrestrained by laws, lanes, or traffic signals. Somehow, the swarm self-organizes to keep people moving and, mostly, not crashing into one another. Papert was fascinated, and spent his first days in Hanoi talking with his former student, Northwestern computer scientist Uri Wilensky, about how to use NetLogo (Wilensky's modification of Logo) to model the city's traffic flow. As the two were crossing a six-lane road separating their hotel from the university, Papert was hit.
That Papert was struck by Hanoi's traffic while thinking about how to model it is ironic, in the proper sense of the word. It's as if he had been hit by one of his own turtles.
