Benjamin Thomas

John McCarthy (1927–2011) was an American computer scientist and mathematician widely known as the Father of Artificial Intelligence. He coined the term “artificial intelligence” in the August 31, 1955 proposal for a summer research project at Dartmouth College. That proposal, written with Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, and Claude Shannon, argued 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.” In 1956 he organized the Dartmouth Summer Research Project: the two-month workshop now considered the founding event of AI as an academic field. The gathering brought together the small group of researchers who would define the discipline for the next several decades. Two years later, while at MIT, McCarthy invented Lisp (1958), a language built around list processing, recursion, and treating programs as data. Lisp became the dominant language of AI research for decades and remains influential. He also co-founded the MIT AI Project with Minsky and later established the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL). Beyond naming and organizing the field, he contributed time-sharing, garbage collection, situation calculus, and methods for representing common-sense knowledge. He received the Turing Award in 1971 and the U.S. National Medal of Science in 1990.