Brian Silverman is a Canadian computer scientist, the creator of many programming environments for children,[1] and a researcher in cellular automata.
Silverman was a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1970s, where he was one of the creators of a tinkertoy computer that played tic-tac-toe.
[1][3] He later worked as a consulting scientist at the MIT Media Lab, where he ported Logo to "programmable bricks", a precursor to Lego Mindstorms,[4] and where he was one of the developers of the Scratch programming language.
He is the co-founder, along with Paula Bonta and Mitchel Resnick,[5] and president of the Playful Invention Company, headquartered in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, which develops the Programmable Cricket, a spin-off from the Media Lab.
[10] He also invented several well-known cellular automaton rules, including Brian's Brain,[11] Seeds, and Wireworld;[12] working with his brother Barry Silverman he recovered the IBM APL\360 sources from tape to a state where they could be run on a mainframe emulator.