Oliver G. Selfridge, a pioneer of computer science, died on Dec. 3 in Boston from injuries he suffered in a fall a few days earlier at his home in Belmont. He lived there with his wife Edwina Rissland and their daughter Olivia when they were not on Chappaquiddick, where Oliver had been a regular visitor for more than three decades. He enjoyed the off-seasons as much as the summers.

Oliver, who was 82 years old, was an early innovator in computer science and one of the founding fathers of artificial intelligence, the specialty that seeks both to understand human intelligence and to replicate or enhance it with computers. He was an organizer of the first public conference session on the subject in 1955, and helped organize the landmark meeting at Dartmouth the next year, which is widely regarded as the birth of the field.

The driving force behind his life’s work was his intense curiosity about how people learn and computers might be able to do so. “The nature of learning — how it works, what it is, and what it means — has always been the primary intellectual motivation for me,” he said in a 1996 interview. “For me that is because learning is the real mainstream of the mind. A mind without learning is not a mind at all.”

His early papers were on neural networks, pattern recognition and learning. His 1958 paper “Pandemonium: a Paradigm for Learning” was the first to describe the idea of autonomous agents (or “demons”) that could work together to solve problems — such as recognize patterns or letters — and to learn or adapt from their experience. The New York Times recently described this paper as the origin of the idea of independent software agents, such as personal assistants.

Oliver Gordon Selfridge was born in London on May 10, 1926, where his grandfather H. Gordon Selfridge, an American-born entrepreneur, founded the Selfridges department store. He received his early education in England, where he exhibited a prodigious talent for mathematics and languages at an early age.

His last year in England, he attended the public school Malvern College, which because of the outbreak of World War II was situated at Blenheim Palace, the monumental palace of Winston Churchill’s family near Oxford. There, Oliver and his schoolmates used Churchill’s capacious bedroom as their dorm. It was there that Oliver developed his lifelong love of music. At first he learned to play the piano because it exempted him from evening Bible readings, but he came to love the music itself, especially playing the piano and singing choral music, madrigals and lieder.

In 1940, at the very beginning of the Blitz, when Oliver was 14, he and his family emigrated to the United States. He often recalled that their Atlantic crossing was an exciting one: both the ship ahead and the one astern were torpedoed.

He attended the Middlesex School in Concord, from which he graduated in 1942. He then attended MIT, where he majored in mathematics and graduated in 1945, shortly after his 19th birthday. Like many of his classmates, he was enrolled and then commissioned as an officer through the Navy’s V12 program but because the war was ending he did not see combat. Instead he served at a variety of posts including the Pacific island of Kwajalein where he first learned to snorkel.

After his service, he returned to MIT as a graduate student of Norbert Weiner, the foremost mathematician of cybernetics and adaptive control. With his fellow graduate students and faculty colleagues including Walter Pitts and Warren McCulloch, he began what would become his life’s work, the systematic study and modeling of human intelligence.

In 1951 he joined MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory and shortly became group leader of a team doing research on communications techniques, pattern recognition, command and control and interactive computing. His group did early work on machine recognition of Morse code. One of the people he hired into his group for a summer was Marvin Minsky, another founding pioneer in AI.

At this time Oliver began serving on many advisory panels to the government. He served on the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board under Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson, was on the Scientific Advisory Board of the National Security Agency, and ran a study section at the National Institutes of Health whose goal was to foster the use of computers in medicine.

In 1963, Oliver ran the kick-off summer study for Project MAC, the first large-scale effort to develop time-sharing, and then worked on MIT’s main campus as its associate director until 1965, when he returned to Lincoln Lab. In 1975 he joined Bolt, Beranek & Newman, now BBN Technologies, where he worked on AI and communications-related technologies. In 1983, he became chief scientist at GTE Labs where he helped establish a research group that applied machine learning techniques to telecommunications.

In recent years, Oliver returned to both MIT and BBN. At MIT he held an appointment as a senior lecturer in the media lab, where he was able to collaborate once again with his lifelong colleague Marvin Minsky. At BBN, he worked on projects that ranged from developing software that learns, to a pen that could lay down a tactile trace so that blind children could explore geometry with some of the spontaneity of sighted children.

In addition to scholarly papers and books, Oliver wrote books for children: Fingers Come in Fives, All About Mud, Sticks, and Trouble With Dragons. He also wrote a set of monographs, which he called math kits, to be used over summer vacation much in the way that children use summer reading lists. Their topics and difficulties tended to grow as did Oliver and Edwina’s daughter Olivia.

At his death, he was also at work on several writing projects, including one he called How Knowledge Began based on his idea that much of human knowledge and civilization derives from our fundamental drive to understand the workings of the cosmos and our place in it. As he said in a 1992 keynote speech on AI, “And what is our Holy Grail? It really is to understand the mindness of mind, to explain what makes a person behave in a human way, to interrelate the emotions and the hungers and the logic of us with our powers and our planning and our enormous joint enterprises that constitute civilization.”

Perhaps that was one reason he treasured his time on Chappy so intensely. For Oliver, Chappy was a wonderful and precious place to observe the heavens and ponder such questions. He relished looking up at the stars from the Dike Bridge on a cold, clear night and swimming against the current at East Beach — with flippers, of course. He felt that Chappy was the closest one could come to heaven on earth.

Oliver was an enthusiastic gardener, an expert skier and an intuitively creative cook. He and Olivia and Edwina built many garden projects over the years, including a small koi pond, complete with a little island (for Olivia), and laying down paths of brick. He enjoyed reaping the harvest from the garden, like Jerusalem artichokes, whose name he liked to point out had nothing to do with biblical lands but rather the tendency of sunflowers to gyre with the sun.

In the 1950s, he was a member of the Mt. Washington Ski Patrol and patrolled the trails around Tuckerman’s Ravine. For the last 30 or so years, he and his family have made annual ski trips to Alta in Utah. An expert skier, he had long since abandoned poles the better to teach others how to ski; he taught Olivia and his three other children from a previous marriage and carried them on his shoulders when they were too young to ski on their own. Weather permitting, he dressed for the slopes with a tie and tweed jacket.

In addition to Edwina and Olivia, Oliver is survived by his sons Mallory Selfridge of Eastford, Conn., and Peter Selfridge of Bethesda, Md., and a daughter Caroline Selfridge of Saratoga, Ca., and six grandchildren. He was proud that all of his children earned advanced degrees, with Olivia just having completed her doctorate in molecular biology at Oxford.

A memorial celebration of his life is being planned for later this year. Contributions in Oliver’s memory can be made to the Chappy Fund of the Sheriff’s Meadow Foundation.