John McCarthy
Computer Scientist & Father of AI
About
John McCarthy (1927–2011) was an American computer scientist who coined the term 'artificial intelligence' in 1955 and organized the seminal 1956 Dartmouth Conference that launched AI as a field. He invented LISP, the second-oldest high-level programming language still in use, which became the dominant language for AI research. A professor at Stanford for decades, he made foundational contributions to time-sharing systems, formal verification, and commonsense reasoning in AI. His vision of machines that could reason and learn shaped the entire trajectory of AI research.
Key Contributions
- Coined 'artificial intelligence' and organized the 1956 Dartmouth workshop that gave the field its name and founding agenda
- Invented Lisp, giving early AI researchers a practical language for symbolic computation and rapid experimentation
- Introduced garbage collection in Lisp, making automatic memory management a practical programming-language idea
- Developed situation calculus and circumscription, formal tools for representing actions, commonsense, and nonmonotonic reasoning
- Proposed the Advice Taker, an early vision of programs that could use declarative knowledge to reason
- Pioneered time-sharing systems, helping shift computers from batch machines toward interactive tools
- Defined the symbolic-AI program whose ambition built the field, but whose limits also helped trigger later critiques and AI winters
