John McCarthy 1927 – 2011

800Px-John Mccarthy Stanford

John McCarthy 1927 – 2011.

John McCarthy (born September 4, 1927, in Boston, Massachusetts), is an American computer scientist and cognitive 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.


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3 Comments

  1. So sad, What an amazing scientist John McCarthy was! The guy was a genius.

    Truly hope one day someone completes the new language he was working on called “Elephant 2000”, it looked amazing. http://www.infoq.com/interviews/mccarthy-elephant-2000

  2. That’s very sad – Oh, I used his ‘Intro to Fortran’ book in high school to teach myself Fortran (after we’d learned Basic on a TTY dialup to timesharing). Oh, it was still a happening language back in ’74. Even “Adventure” was written in it.

    Dennis Richie, and now John McCarthy.

    Mike Y
    Dallas, Texas

  3. Hey, Mike- by any chance, did you go to HS in Nassau County, NY? At the same time, BOCES ran a time-share on a DEC PDP-(?) computer. Our HS had a dial-up line (Acoustically-coupled modem at a blazing 110 baud!) connected to a Teletype ASR-33. Those were the days of BASIC and (shudder) TECO!

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