John McCarthy

John McCarthy is a prominent computer scientist who received the Turing Award in 1971 for his major contributions to the field of Artificial Intelligence. He was responsible for the coining of the term "Artificial Intelligence" in his 1955 proposal for the 1956 Dartmouth Conference.

McCarthy championed expressing knowledge declaratively in mathematical logic for Artificial Intelligence. In 1958, he proposed the advice taker, which inspired later work on question-answering and logic programming. He invented the Lisp programming language and published its design in Communications of the ACM in 1960. He helped to motivate the creation of Project MAC at MIT, but left MIT for Stanford University in 1962, where he helped set up the Stanford AI Laboratory, for many years a friendly rival to Project MAC.

See:

• http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/
• http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_McCarthy_%28computer_scientist%29