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John McCarthy (computer scientist)

Founding father of artificial intelligence and creator of Lisp.

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John McCarthy (computer scientist)

via Wikipedia: John McCarthy (computer scientist) · see source

He co-authored the proposal for the Dartmouth workshop that coined the term "artificial intelligence" and developed the Lisp programming language.[1][2] John McCarthy, an American computer scientist and cognitive scientist, was born on September 4, 1927, and died on October 24, 2011.[1] For the majority of his professional life, McCarthy was affiliated with Stanford University; in 1971 he was awarded the Turing Award for his work in artificial intelligence.[3]

Life and work

He taught himself college math from Caltech textbooks during his teens and graduated from Belmont High School two years early.[4][5] McCarthy was suspended from Caltech for missing physical education, served in the US Army, and then earned a BS in mathematics in 1948.[5] He received a PhD in mathematics from Princeton University in 1951 under Donald C. Spencer.[6] In 1956, McCarthy moved to MIT as a research fellow and later became affectionately known as "Uncle John" by his students.[7]

He invented garbage collection methods for automatic memory management around 1959 and proposed the use of recursion and conditional expressions for ALGOL.[8][9] In 1961, he suggested the idea of utility computing, where computing power could be sold like water or electricity.[10] Due to the Great Depression, McCarthy's family relocated often; they eventually settled in Los Angeles, where his father secured employment with the Amalgamated Clothing Workers.[11][12] In 1962, McCarthy became a professor of computer science at Stanford University and established the Stanford University Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.[12]

What the cited sources add

The Irish Times also reports that McCarthy defined AI in 2007 as "the science and engineering of making intelligent machines"[12] The Foreword by Jeff Sutherland confirms that McCarthy was Director of the Lab and co-authored the document that coined "artificial intelligence"[2] McCarthy's own account of the 1989 censorship flap at Stanford describes how the Computer Science Department faculty unanimously opposed a ban on a file called rhf.[13] The same document quotes the Stanford Academic Freedom statement that "Expression of the widest range of viewpoints should be encouraged".[13]

According to The Irish Times, McCarthy's father was born and raised in Cromane, which is in Kerry, and the family visited Ireland before settling in Boston.[12]

References

  1. Wikipedia, "John McCarthy (computer scientist)" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Mishlove, "with the same title", Ghost Archive, November 3, 2011; Feigenbaum, "McCarthy as Scientist and Engineer, with Personal Recollections", AI Magazine, December 2012, p. 17–18; "Foreword by Jeff Sutherland on the origin of Scrum and AI", Foreword by Jeff Sutherland on the origin of Scrum and AI (we also read that source) en.wikipedia.org
  2. "Foreword by Jeff Sutherland on the origin of Scrum and AI", Foreword by Jeff Sutherland on the origin of Scrum and AI. facts only, no text reused. scrum-ai.com
  3. Wikipedia, "John McCarthy (computer scientist)" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: McCarthy, "Professor John McCarthy", jmc.stanford.edu; "John McCarthy – A.M. Turing Award Laureate", amturing.acm.org (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
  4. Wikipedia, "John McCarthy (computer scientist)" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Woo, "John McCarthy dies at 84; the father of artificial intelligence", Los Angeles Times, October 28, 2011 (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
  5. Wikipedia, "John McCarthy (computer scientist)" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Hayes, "On John McCarthy's 80th Birthday, in Honor of his Contributions", AI Magazine, 2007, p. 93–102; Williams, "Arguing A.I.: The Battle for Twenty-first-Century Science", AtRandom, March 5, 2002; Lester Earnest, "A. M. Turing award: John McCarthy, United States – 1971", ACM (we also read that source) en.wikipedia.org
  6. Wikipedia, "John McCarthy (computer scientist)" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: McCarthy, "Projection operators and partial differential equations", 1951 (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
  7. Wikipedia, "John McCarthy (computer scientist)" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Steven Levy, "Hackers, Heroes of the Computer Revolution", Gutenberg.org, p. 34 (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
  8. Wikipedia, "John McCarthy (computer scientist)" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: McCarthy, "Letter to the editor", Communications of the ACM, August 1959, p. 2–3; Jeuring, "Profile of IFIP Working Group 2.1", Foswiki, August 17, 2016; Swierstra, "ScopeEtc: IFIP21: Foswiki", Foswiki, March 2, 2011 (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
  9. Wikipedia, "John McCarthy (computer scientist)" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: McCarthy, "Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine, Pt I", Communications of the ACM, April 1960, p. 184–195; "Recursive functions of symbolic expressions and their computation by machine, Part I" (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
  10. Wikipedia, "John McCarthy (computer scientist)" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Garfinkel, "Architects of the Information Society, Thirty-Five Years of the Laboratory for Computer Science at MIT", MIT Press, 1999, p. 1; The lecture, entitled "Time Sharing Computer Systems," is pp. 220-248 in Management and the Computer of the Future (ed Martin Greenberger), published 1962, late (we also read that source) en.wikipedia.org
  11. Wikipedia, "John McCarthy (computer scientist)" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: "Leading academic who coined the term 'artificial intelligence'", The Irish Times; "History of Computers and Computing, Birth of the modern computer, Software history, LISP of John McCarthy", history-computer.com (we also read that source) en.wikipedia.org
  12. "Leading academic who coined the term 'artificial intelligence'", The Irish Times. facts only, no text reused. irishtimes.com
  13. McCarthy, "Attempt at Censorship of Electronic Libraries at Stanford University in 1989", formal.stanford.edu, May 12, 1997. facts only, no text reused. www-formal.stanford.edu

Each numbered sentence above was checked against the source it cites before publication. Sentences citing Wikipedia adapt text from the English Wikipedia article John McCarthy (computer scientist) (contributors), used under CC BY-SA 4.0; this entry is available under the same licence. Other sources were used for facts only; no text or images are copied from them.

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Sources

Compiled from Wikipedia and the sources listed below. Text from Wikipedia is available under CC BY-SA 4.0; this entry is adapted from it.

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