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John McCarthy

1927–2011 · 84 years Tier II

Suspended for skipping gym class, he later coined "artificial intelligence"

Portrait of John McCarthy — "null0" — 2006-05-13 — CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

McCarthy's parents were Communist Party members in 1930s Boston who pushed their son toward argument and mathematics rather than obedience. He finished high school two years early, taught himself enough college mathematics to skip two full years at Caltech, and was suspended at one point for missing required physical education — a rule he apparently thought did not apply to him. An Army stint interrupted his degree; he finished a B.S. in mathematics in 1948 anyway, then took a Ph.D. at Princeton in 1951 under Donald Spencer. He was twenty-three, unusually sure of himself, and already convinced that thinking itself was a kind of computation waiting to be written down properly.

At a 1956 summer workshop he organized at Dartmouth with Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester and Claude Shannon, McCarthy proposed the name for the new field: artificial intelligence. Two years later, at MIT, he worked out that the mathematical notation used for symbolic logic could double as a programming language, and Lisp — built on recursion and symbolic lists rather than fixed sequences of instructions — became the second-oldest programming language still in active use and the default tool of AI researchers for three decades afterward. He also devised an early scheme for automatic memory cleanup, later called garbage collection, and helped design the time-sharing systems that let many people use one computer at once. Stanford made him a full professor in 1962, and he ran its artificial intelligence laboratory for years. The Turing Award came in 1971.

His second wife, Vera Watson, had built a career entirely apart from his: a database programmer at IBM who worked on System R, the project that produced the first working implementation of SQL, and a mountaineer on the side, skilled enough to make the first woman's solo ascent of Aconcagua, in South America, in 1974. In October 1978 she was part of the first all-women expedition to summit Annapurna, one of the deadliest mountains on Earth, attempting an unclimbed central summit with her partner Alison Chadwick-Onyszkiewicz when the two of them slipped near Camp V and fell to their deaths. McCarthy later married a third time, to the computer scientist Carolyn Talcott.

McCarthy died at his home on the Stanford campus on October 24, 2011, at eighty-four, having advised roughly thirty doctoral students and outlived most of his own predictions. He had assumed in the 1950s that a machine matching human reasoning was perhaps a decade or two away; six decades later it still was not, and he spent much of his late career defending that early optimism against colleagues who thought the whole premise was mistaken. What proved durable was not the timeline but the tools: Lisp's ideas about recursion, symbolic lists, and functional programming migrated into nearly every language written after it, an afterlife that has outlasted the argument that produced it.

Lifespan

15401700180019002030

John McCarthy's life against the full span of the corpus.

Notable works

A Proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence article
Coined the field's name 1955
Lisp invention
Still in use, and still shaping how programmers think about recursion 1958
Time-sharing systems invention
Let multiple users share one computer at once 1959
Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory company
Founded and directed for years 1965

Life in brief

with age at each point

1944 aged ~17 Enters Caltech two years early, having taught himself the coursework
1948 aged ~21 Earns a B.S. in mathematics at Caltech after an Army interruption He had earlier been suspended once for skipping physical education.
1951 aged ~24 Earns a Ph.D. in mathematics from Princeton
Summer 1956 aged ~29 Coins the term "artificial intelligence" at the Dartmouth workshop he organized
1958 aged ~31 Invents the Lisp programming language at MIT
1962 aged ~35 Becomes a full professor at Stanford
1971 aged ~44 Wins the Turing Award
October 17, 1978 aged 51 His wife Vera Watson dies in a fall on Annapurna
October 24, 2011 aged 84 Dies at his home on the Stanford campus