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John McCarthy

Computing Methodologies

John McCarthy was an American computer scientist who coined the term artificial intelligence and organized the 1956 Dartmouth workshop that gave the field its name, and who designed the Lisp programming language in 1958, one of the earliest languages built specifically for symbolic and list processing rather than numerical computation. He received the 1971 ACM Turing Award for his contributions to artificial intelligence.

Facts
Birth Year
1927 1
Birth Date
1927-09-04 2
Death Year
2011 1
Death Date
2011-10-24 2
Nationality
American 1
John McCarthy
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Connections

Associated With

Artificial Intelligence, Fields

John McCarthy coined the term artificial intelligence for the 1956 Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence, the workshop that founded the field as a distinct research area.

Source The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital RevolutionWalter Isaacson
Functional Programming, Concepts

John McCarthy's Lisp (1958) was the first language to embody functional programming's core ideas, treating functions as first-class values and favoring recursion over iteration.

Source The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital RevolutionWalter Isaacson
Source Wikipedia: Marvin Minsky

In Field

Source ACM A.M. Turing Award Citations

Invented

Source Wikipedia: Garbage collection (computer science)
Source The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital RevolutionWalter Isaacson
In the Other Atlases
Sources
1. The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution
Walter Isaacson, Simon and Schuster, 2014
2. Wikipedia: John McCarthy (computer scientist)
Wikimedia Foundation
  • Contributions in computer science
    McCarthy, Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester and Claude E. Shannon coined the term 'artificial intelligence' in a proposal for the famous Dartmouth conference in Summer 1956.
  • Lead section, opening sentence
    John McCarthy (September 4, 1927, October 24, 2011) was an American computer scientist and cognitive scientist.
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ACM A.M. Turing Award Citations
Association for Computing Machinery
  • Citation
    Dr. McCarthy's lecture "The Present State of Research on Artificial Intelligence" is a topic that covers the area in which he has achieved considerable recognition for his work.
  • In Field: Artificial Intelligence
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Stanford Computer Science, In Memoriam, Professor John McCarthy
  • In Memoriam tribute, paragraph on founding artificial intelligence
    John was one of the founders of artificial intelligence (AI), coining that name in 1955.
  • In Memoriam tribute, paragraph on inventing LISP
    In 1958, John invented the list processing language LISP, which became the language of choice for programming AI systems.
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Wikipedia: Garbage collection (computer science)
Wikimedia FoundationInvented: Garbage Collection, History section
Quote, Invented: Garbage Collection, History section
Garbage collection was invented by American computer scientist John McCarthy
View the Source
Wikipedia: Marvin Minsky
Wikimedia FoundationAssociated With: Marvin Minsky, MIT AI Lab section
Quote, Associated With: Marvin Minsky, MIT AI Lab section
He and John McCarthy initiated what was, as of 2003, named the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
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