McCarthy, John

John McCarthy was born on September 4, 1927.

John McCarthy showed an early aptitude for mathematics, and in his youth taught himself mathematics using the university textbooks used at Caltech. As a result, when he entered the university, he was able to skip the first two years of mathematics.

He received a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Caltech in 1948, and a Ph.D. in mathematics from Princeton in 1951. After short-term positions at Princeton, Stanford, Dartmouth, and MIT, he became a professor at Stanford in 1962, where he remained until his retirement at the end of 2000.

John McCarthy advocated the use of mathematical logic for artificial intelligence. In 1958, he developed the Lisp programming language and published its description in the Communications of the ACM in April 1960. John McCarthy is a founder of functional programming and a Turing Award laureate (1971) for his contributions to the field of artificial intelligence research.

Member of the US National Academy of Sciences (1989)

John McCarthy died on October 24, 2011 at the age of 84.

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