John McCarthy was an American computer scientist and cognitive scientist. McCarthy was one of the founders of the discipline of artificial intelligence.
John McCarthy,an American mathematician and computer scientist who was a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence ; his main research in the field involved the formalization of common-sense knowledge.
John McCarthy was bornin Boston, Massachusetts to immigrant parents. His father was the Business Manager of the Daily Worker, a national newspaper owned by the Communist Party USA. The family moved to New York City, but John was a sickly child and his parents took him to Los Angeles for his health. There he began reading books on mathematics at the nearby California Institute of Technology and when he was admitted there as an undergraduate in 1944 he was given advanced standing. He managed to graduate in 1948.
After a year of graduate studies at Caltech he went to Princeton and received a PhD in mathematics in 1951 based on a dissertation that solved a problem in partial differential equations. He taught there until 1953, when he became an assistant professor of mathematics at Stanford until 1955. One of his first major publications was a book Automata Studies he and Claude Shannon co-edited during this period. He also held professorships at Dartmouth College , the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , and Stanford University .
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 distinct from nets. McCarthy’s numerous honours include the A.M. Turing Award , the Kyoto Prize , the National Medal of Science , and the Benjamin Franklin Medal .