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
Questions they sharpened View the streams
Videos & Interviews
Papers & Publications
Connections
Claude Shannon
CollaboratedMathematician & Father of Information Theory
Before the field had a name, McCarthy and Shannon co-edited Automata Studies (1956), a volume that put von Neumann on building reliable organisms from unreliable parts beside a run of papers on Turing machines. That same year the two of them, with Minsky and Rochester, signed the Dartmouth proposal where the phrase 'artificial intelligence' first appears — Shannon listed at Bell Telephone Laboratories, offering to apply information theory to computing machines and brain models. The literature came first; the name arrived within the year.
www-formal.stanford.edu · en.wikipedia.org · Automata Studies, Annals of Mathematics Studies 34, Princeton University Press (1956), eds. C. E. Shannon & J. McCarthy
Alonzo Church
Influenced byMathematician & Logician
Lisp's lambda comes straight from Church, and McCarthy said so plainly: 'it seemed natural to use the λ-notation of Church (1941). I didn't understand the rest of his book, so I wasn't tempted to try to implement his more general mechanism for defining functions.' A logician's calculus became a working programming construct through a borrowing its borrower described as partial. Half the ancestry of AI's first language runs back to a 1936 proof about the limits of mathematics.
www-formal.stanford.edu · www-formal.stanford.edu
François Chollet
In contrastAI Researcher & Creator of Keras
Both wrote a definition of intelligence that shaped everything after it, and the two definitions are near opposites. McCarthy's Dartmouth proposal held that every aspect of intelligence can in principle be described precisely enough for a machine to simulate it — a premise that founded a field by quietly assuming its problem away. Chollet's is a refusal of that exact move: intelligence is not any specifiable skill but the efficiency of acquiring skill on problems the specification never anticipated. Seventy years apart, they are the two poles of this site's question 'What is intelligence?'.
Alan Turing
In contrastMathematician & Computer Science Pioneer
Both asked what a thinking machine would be, and answered in opposite directions. Turing refused to define thought and proposed a game instead: if you cannot tell, what exactly is missing? McCarthy's Dartmouth proposal defined intelligence as whatever can be described precisely enough to simulate — a working premise that founded a field and quietly assumed the answer to its own question. Behaviour against specification; the argument is still running under newer names.
