Jerome Bruner

Born October 1, 1915, Bruner took his BA from Duke in 1937 and a PhD from Harvard in 1941. He taught and researched at Harvard, Oxford, and NYU, building a career that spanned cognitive psychology and education theory. His central claim: the mind doesn't simply receive knowledge; it builds it, restructures it, discovers it. That idea reshaped how curricula were designed and how teachers understood their students' minds. A 2002 survey ranked him the 28th most cited psychologist of the 20th century. He died June 5, 2016, after seven decades of arguing that learning is an act of invention.