John McCarthy
1927–2011Computer scientist who coined the term 'artificial intelligence' at the 1956 Dartmouth workshop and invented Lisp — the language that powered AI research for four decades.
- Coined 'artificial intelligence' (1956).
- Designed Lisp (1958) — still the spiritual ancestor of every functional language.
- Pioneered time-sharing and the cloud computing concept.
FAQ
Who coined the term 'artificial intelligence'?
John McCarthy proposed the phrase in the 1955 funding application for the 1956 Dartmouth workshop. He picked it deliberately to distance the new field from cybernetics and to signal that machine intelligence was a legitimate research target.
What is Lisp?
A programming language McCarthy designed at MIT in 1958. Its s-expression syntax and treat-code-as-data philosophy made it the working language of AI research for four decades and the spiritual ancestor of every modern functional language.
What was the 1956 Dartmouth workshop?
A two-month summer gathering at Dartmouth College organised by McCarthy, Minsky, Shannon, and Rochester. It is widely treated as the founding event of artificial intelligence as a research discipline, even though most of its concrete predictions did not pan out on schedule.
What is McCarthy's connection to cloud computing?
He proposed the idea of computing as a public utility in a 1961 MIT centennial speech, decades before networks were ready for it. The vision he described — pay-as-you-go shared compute — is essentially the cloud model that became real in the 2000s.