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John McCarthy, American mathematician and computer scientist who was a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence (AI); his research involved the formalization of commonsense knowledge. He coined the term ‘artificial intelligence’ in 1955 and created the computer programming language LISP in 1958.

John was a legendary computer scientist at Stanford University who developed time-sharing, invented LISP, and founded the field of Artificial Intelligence. In March 2011 John launched Project JMC with the objective to make his work more approachable and accessible.

John McCarthy, a professor emeritus of computer science at Stanford, the man who coined the term "artificial intelligence" and subsequently went on to define the field for more than five decades, died suddenly at his home in Stanford in the early morning Monday, Oct. 24. He was 84.

John McCarthy was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1927. He received a BS in mathematics from Caltech (1948) and a PhD, also in mathematics, from Princeton University (1951). McCarthy was a pioneer in the fields of artificial intelligence (AI), computer science, and interactive computing systems.

In the News 1985 Computer Pioneer Award IEEE Computer Society Stanford Announces John McCarthy's Benjamin Franklin Award Life in the Cloud, Living with Cloud Computing August 25, 2008 Please send other news items about John McCarthy to ProjectJMC@MagicLab.org Obituaries Nature New York Times Stanford News San Francisco Gate IEEE Computer Society

McCarthy earned his B.S. in mathematics from the California Institute of Technology in 1948 and his Ph.D. from Princeton in 1951. He has won numerous awards including the Kyoto Prize and the National Medal of Science. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of ...

He also made substantial contributions to the algebraic languages ALGOL 58 and 60. McCarthy’s students developed the first computer program to play chess convincingly. It ran initially on an IBM 704 computer and incorporated McCarthy’s alpha-beta pruning scheme to reduce the number of positions that had to be considered.

John McCarthy is Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University. He has been interested in artificial intelligence since 1948 and coined the term in 1955. His main artificial intelligence research area has been the formalization of common sense knowledge.