John McCarthy (1927-2011) was an American computer scientist who coined the term "artificial intelligence" in 1955 and organized the 1956 Dartmouth workshop that founded the field as an academic discipline. He also created the LISP programming language, one of the earliest and most influential languages for AI research.
Early career and the Dartmouth proposal
McCarthy studied mathematics at Caltech and Princeton, where he was influenced by Claude Shannon's work on information theory. In 1955, while at Dartmouth College, he co-authored a funding proposal with Marvin Minsky, Claude Shannon, and Nathaniel Rochester for a summer research project to explore "the conjecture that every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it." The proposal introduced the term "artificial intelligence," and the resulting 1956 workshop is conventionally treated as the field's founding event.
LISP and symbolic computation
In 1958, McCarthy, then at MIT, designed LISP (List Processor), a language built around symbolic expressions and recursive functions that became the dominant language of Symbolic AI research for decades. LISP introduced ideas, including garbage collection and conditional expressions, that influenced programming languages well beyond AI. McCarthy also pioneered time-sharing computer systems and, in a 1959 paper, proposed the "Advice Taker," an early design for a program that could use logical reasoning to solve problems, an ancestor of later work on expert systems and knowledge representation.
Stanford and later career
McCarthy moved to Stanford University in 1962, where he founded the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and spent most of his career. He remained a proponent of logic-based approaches to AI, arguing that common-sense reasoning required formal representations of knowledge, a position that put him in tension with the statistical and neural-network approaches that came to dominate the field decades later, including the Deep learning methods behind modern large language models. He received the Turing Award in 1971 for his contributions to AI.
Legacy
McCarthy's Dartmouth proposal effectively named the field of artificial intelligence, and his conviction that intelligence could be captured through formal, symbolic rules shaped the first several decades of AI research, an approach later termed "good old-fashioned AI" or symbolic AI. Though his logic-based paradigm was largely superseded by data-driven Machine learning, his emphasis on common-sense reasoning and formal knowledge representation continues to inform discussions about the limits of purely statistical systems and the pursuit of Artificial general intelligence.