John McCarthy (computer scientist)
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Categories: 1927 births | Members of the National Academy of Sciences | Living people | Artificial intelligence researchers | Jewish American scientists | Lisp programming language | Programming language designers | Usenet people | American computer scientists | Computer pioneers | Turing Award laureates | People from Boston, Massachusetts | Irish-Americans | National Medal of Science laureates | Formal methods people | Stanford University faculty | California Institute of Technology alumni | Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery | History of artificial intelligence | Jewish atheists
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For other uses, see John McCarthy (disambiguation).
John McCarthy (born September 4, 1927, in Boston, Massachusetts), is an American computer scientist who received the Turing Award in 1971 for his major contributions to the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI). He was responsible for the coining of the term "Artificial Intelligence" in his 1955 proposal for the 1956 Dartmouth Conference and is the inventor of the Lisp programming language.
BiographyMcCarthy received his B.S. in Mathematics from the California Institute of Technology in 1948 and his Ph.D. in Mathematics from Princeton University in 1951 under Solomon Lefschetz. After short-term appointments at Princeton, Stanford, Dartmouth, and MIT, he became a full professor at Stanford in 1962, where he remained until his retirement at the end of 2000. He is now a Professor Emeritus. McCarthy championed mathematical logic for Artificial Intelligence. In 1958, he proposed the advice taker, which inspired later work on question-answering and logic programming. Based on the Lambda Calculus, Lisp rapidly became the programming language of choice for AI applications after its publication in 1960 [2]. He helped to motivate the creation of Project MAC at MIT, but left MIT for Stanford University in 1962, where he helped set up the Stanford AI Laboratory, for many years a friendly rival to Project MAC. In 1961, he was the first to publicly suggest (in a speech given to celebrate MIT's centennial) that computer time-sharing technology might lead to a future in which computing power and even specific applications could be sold through the utility business model (like water or electricity). This idea of a computer or information utility was very popular in the late 1960s, but faded by the mid-1970s as it became clear that the hardware, software and telecommunications technologies of the time were simply not ready. However, since 2000, the idea has resurfaced in new forms. See application service provider. John McCarthy often comments on world affairs on the Usenet forums. Some of his ideas can be found in his sustainability web page, which is "aimed at showing that human material progress is desirable and sustainable". See alsoReferences
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