John McCarthy, creator of the Lisp programming language and a pioneer in artificial intelligence, has died. He was 84.
McCarthy died yesterday, Stanford University School of Engineering announced today in a tweet. McCarthy invented Lisp, a program that became the language of your choice for AI in 1958, while at MIT and has published its design in the 1960 paper recursive functions of symbolic expressions and their computation by machine Part I. One of the oldest high level programming language (second only to Fortran), Lisp is still in use today.
He felt there were aspects of human intelligence that could be described accurately enough that a machine can be programmed to simulate it.
"If a machine can do a job, an automatic calculator can be programmed to simulate the machine," he wrote in 1955 a research proposal on the subject. "The speed and memory capabilities of modern computers may be insufficient to simulate many of the higher functions of the human brain, but the biggest obstacle is not lack of capacity of the machine, but our inability to write programs that maximizing have. "
McCarthy also credited with coining the term "artificial intelligence" in this proposal, which he described as "the science and engineering of making intelligent machines."
"I got the name when I had to write the proposal for support to research for the Rockefeller Foundation conference," he told CNET News in 2006. "And indeed, the city's name is, I was thinking about the participants rather than the source of funding.
McCarthy was born in 1927 in Boston socialist immigrant parents, who were forced to move frequently during the Great Depression. During his teens, he taught mathematics through the study of textbooks used in Catltech when his family lived in Los Angeles.
When McCarthy enrolled at Caltech, was allowed to waive the first two years of mathematics curriculum. Would earn a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Caltech in 1948 and Ph.D. in mathematics from Princeton in 1951.
McCarthy joined the Stanford faculty in 1962 after short appointments at Princeton, Dartmouth, and MIT. He retired in 2000.
McCarthy won the Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery in 1972 and the National Medal of Science in 1991.
McCarthy died yesterday, Stanford University School of Engineering announced today in a tweet. McCarthy invented Lisp, a program that became the language of your choice for AI in 1958, while at MIT and has published its design in the 1960 paper recursive functions of symbolic expressions and their computation by machine Part I. One of the oldest high level programming language (second only to Fortran), Lisp is still in use today.
He felt there were aspects of human intelligence that could be described accurately enough that a machine can be programmed to simulate it.
"If a machine can do a job, an automatic calculator can be programmed to simulate the machine," he wrote in 1955 a research proposal on the subject. "The speed and memory capabilities of modern computers may be insufficient to simulate many of the higher functions of the human brain, but the biggest obstacle is not lack of capacity of the machine, but our inability to write programs that maximizing have. "
McCarthy also credited with coining the term "artificial intelligence" in this proposal, which he described as "the science and engineering of making intelligent machines."
"I got the name when I had to write the proposal for support to research for the Rockefeller Foundation conference," he told CNET News in 2006. "And indeed, the city's name is, I was thinking about the participants rather than the source of funding.
McCarthy was born in 1927 in Boston socialist immigrant parents, who were forced to move frequently during the Great Depression. During his teens, he taught mathematics through the study of textbooks used in Catltech when his family lived in Los Angeles.
When McCarthy enrolled at Caltech, was allowed to waive the first two years of mathematics curriculum. Would earn a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Caltech in 1948 and Ph.D. in mathematics from Princeton in 1951.
McCarthy joined the Stanford faculty in 1962 after short appointments at Princeton, Dartmouth, and MIT. He retired in 2000.
McCarthy won the Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery in 1972 and the National Medal of Science in 1991.
