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19561950s
John McCarthy
Computer scientist who coined the term 'Artificial Intelligence' and invented LISP.
Organizations
Stanford UniversityMITDartmouth College
Major Achievements
- •Co-organized the 1956 Dartmouth Conference, officially launching AI as a field.
- •Invented LISP (1958), the dominant programming language for symbolic AI for decades.
- •Pioneered the concept of computer time-sharing, transforming the economics of computing.
- •Founded the Stanford AI Laboratory (SAIL).
Key Papers
- A Proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence
John McCarthy et al. · AI Magazine (2006 reprint) · 1955
- Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine, Part I
John McCarthy · Communications of the ACM · 1960
- Circumscription — A Form of Non-Monotonic Reasoning
John McCarthy · Artificial Intelligence · 1980
Videos
Oral History of John McCarthy
Computer History Museum