School of Information Science - Hall of Fame
- John McCarthy
- Born: September 4, 1927
- Field: Artificial intelligence; programming languages
- Focus: Invented the Lisp programming language. Coined the phrase "artificial intelligence."
- Country: United States
- Era: 1950 to 1969
John McCarthy is a prominent computer scientist who received the A.M. Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery in 1971 for his major contributions to the field of artificial intelligence. In fact, he was responsible for the coining the term "artificial intelligence", which he did at the Dartmouth Conference in 1955. McCarthy invented the Lisp programming language and published its design in Communications of the ACM in 1960.
McCarthy received his B.S. in Mathematics from the California Institute of Technology in 1948 and his Ph.D. in Mathematics from Princeton University in 1951. He has retired and is now a Professor Emeritus at Stanford University.