McCarthy, John

John McCarthy, (born September 4, 1927, Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.—died October 24, 2011, Stanford, California), American mathematician and computer scientist who was a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence (AI); his main research in the field involved the formalization of commonsense knowledge.

McCarthy received a bachelor’s degree in mathematics (1948) from the California Institute of Technology and a doctorate in mathematics (1951) from Princeton University, where he briefly taught. He also held professorships at Dartmouth College (1955–58); the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1958–62), where he worked on the earliest time-sharing systems; and Stanford University (1953–55 and 1962–2000), where he founded the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab (SAIL), one of the leading centres for research in the field.

McCarthy coined the term artificial intelligence in 1955, and he created the computer programming language LISP in 1958. LISP was initially used primarily by the AI community, owing to its great flexibility due to its expressive power. Though its use declined in the 1990s, in the 21st century there was renewed interest in LISP, especially in the open-source community.

McCarthy also was involved with developing Elephant 2000, a programming language with semantic features based on speech acts. Though its name suggested that it might be implemented in the year 2000, McCarthy revised the deployment date twice—to 2005 and then to 2015. He also developed ideas about the processing characteristics of trees (as used in computing), as distinct from nets. McCarthy’s numerous honours included the A.M. Turing Award (1971), the Kyoto Prize (1988), the National Medal of Science (1990), and the Benjamin Franklin Medal (2003).