John McCarthy (computer scientist)

Biography

John McCarthy (September 4, 1927 – October 24, 2011) was an American computer scientist and cognitive scientist . He was one of the founders of the discipline of artificial intelligence , [ 1 ] and part of just a small group of artificial intelligence researchers in the 1950s and 1960s. [ 2 ] He co-authored the proposal for the Dartmouth workshop which coined the term "artificial intelligence" (AI), led the development of the symbolic programming language family Lisp and had a large influence in the language ALGOL , popularized time-sharing , and created garbage collection . [ 3 ] McCarthy spent most of his career at Stanford University . [ 4 ] He received many accolades and honors, such as the 1971 Turing Award for his contributions to the topic of AI, [ 5 ] the United States National Medal of Science , and the Kyoto Prize . John McCarthy was born in Boston, Massachusetts , on September 4, 1927, to an Irish immigrant father and a Lithuanian Jewish immigrant mother, [ 6 ] John Patrick and Ida (Glatt) McCarthy. The family was obliged to relocate frequently during the Great Depression , until McCarthy's father found work as an organizer for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers in Los Angeles, California . His father came from Cromane , a small fishing village in County Kerry , Ireland. [ 7 ] His mother died in 1957. [ 8 ] Fields: Computer science Education: California Institute of Technology BS Princeton University MS PhD Award Citation: Turing Award (1971) Computer Pioneer Award (1985) IJCAI Award for Research Excellence (1985) Kyoto Prize (1988) National Medal of Science (1990) Benjamin Franklin Medal (2003)

About the Turing Award

The ACM A.M. Turing Award is an annual prize given by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for contributions of lasting and major technical importance to computer science. It is generally recognized as the highest distinction in computer science and is colloquially known as the "Nobel Prize of Computing."

Quick Facts

• Award: ACM A.M. Turing Award
• Added: 2026-02-07
• Source: Wikipedia
• Prize: $1,000,000 (USD)
• Presented by: ACM

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Notable Winners

• Donald Knuth (1974)
• Tim Berners-Lee (2016)
• Geoffrey Hinton (2018)
• Yoshua Bengio (2018)
• Yann LeCun (2018)