John McCarthy
John McCarthy was a mathematician and computer scientist who helped establish artificial intelligence as a research field. His collaborators on the 1955 Dartmouth proposal were Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester and Claude Shannon. McCarthy developed Lisp, a language for working with symbolic expressions, and advocated interactive time-sharing. At Stanford, he helped build the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory with Lester Earnest. His research examined logical representations of knowledge and ways to reason when information is incomplete. He received the 1971 ACM Turing Award, became an emeritus professor in 2001 and died in 2011. His Lisp work made symbolic expressions a practical part of AI programming.
- Works
- 315
- Citations
- 20,613
- h-index
- 58
Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 14 October 2026.
Timeline
-
1955–1956
Naming a research program
Coauthored the 1955 Dartmouth proposal, which named the AI research program.
-
1958–1960
Creating Lisp
Developed Lisp and published its mathematical foundations in 1960.
-
1962 onward
Building the Stanford community
Returned to Stanford and helped establish its AI laboratory with Lester Earnest.
-
1980
Reasoning with incomplete knowledge
Formalized circumscription, a method for reasoning with incomplete information.
-
2001–2011
A continuing research legacy
Became professor emeritus in 2001 and died on 24 October 2011.
Sources and credits
Photo: "null0". License: CC BY-SA 2.0. Source: commons.wikimedia.org. Cropped to a square and resized. Ask us to remove or replace this photo.
