John McCarthy (1927–2011) was an American computer scientist and cognitive scientist who coined the term “Artificial Intelligence” and created the Lisp programming language. He is considered one of the founding fathers of AI research.
Early Career
After receiving his PhD from Princeton, McCarthy joined Dartmouth College where he organized the famous 1956 Dartmouth Conference—the event that gave birth to AI as a field. His proposal for the conference introduced the term “artificial intelligence” to describe the study of making machines that can think.
Creating Lisp
At MIT in 1958, McCarthy developed Lisp as a mathematical notation for computer programs. The language’s power came from treating code as data, enabling programs to manipulate themselves. Lisp pioneered concepts that became standard in programming: garbage collection, recursion, and the REPL.
Time-Sharing Pioneer
McCarthy was instrumental in developing time-sharing systems at MIT, allowing multiple users to share a single computer interactively. This concept—now taken for granted—was revolutionary and laid groundwork for modern computing infrastructure.
Stanford AI Lab
In 1962, McCarthy moved to Stanford where he founded the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL). Under his leadership, SAIL became one of the world’s premier AI research centers, producing breakthroughs in robotics, computer vision, and natural language processing.
Philosophy and Impact
McCarthy believed strongly in formal methods and mathematical rigor in AI research. His work on the Situation Calculus provided foundations for reasoning about actions and change. He received the Turing Award in 1971 for his contributions to AI.