Biographies of John
McCarthy
John McCarthy named and
helped pioneer the field of artificial intelligence. He led the development of the
LISP programming language to facilitate research in that field, initiated the
development of computer timesharing, which made interactive computing practical
for the first time and thus enabled the development of general
purpose computer networks such as the Internet. He was raised as a
Communist but eventually became a conservative Republican. He graduated from
Caltech in 1948 then earned a PhD at Princeton University, came to Stanford�s
Math Department for a time, then to Dartmouth, then M.I.T. and back to
Stanford, where his AI Project expanded in scope, becoming the Stanford
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL). He has received many honors for his
outstanding innovations.
N. Nilsson, John McCarthy, 1927-2011, a Biographical
Memoir,
Celebration
of John McCarthy's accomplishments, held 25 March 2012, shows both text and video versions of talks about
his accomplishments.
Welcome to John McCarthy's
new website links to an interesting television interview of McCarthy
with additional links to tributes about his contributions to artificial
intelligence and related topics.
L. Earnest, John McCarthy (1927-2011),
December 2011. John McCarthy introduced the term �artificial intelligence�
to identify his principal interest and created the LISP programming language to
help develop that field. He also initiated the mathematical theory of
computation and the development of computer timesharing, which was a necessary
precursor of the Internet. He deservedly has been honored by many national and
international organizations.
L. Earnest, How John
McCarthy accidentally started uniting the World, March 2012, is a text
version of one of the Celebration talks discussing McCarthy�s innovative idea
on how to create general purpose timesharing systems, which both greatly
enhanced the efficiency of program development and enabled the Internet to be
created much earlier than would otherwise have happened.
B. Meyer, John McCarthy,
P. McJones, History of LISP,
2012. A comprehensive review of the many branches of the LISP
programming language.
J. McCarthy, Soviet takeover of
Czechoslovakia in 1968,
