John McCarthy

John McCarthy created the LISP programming language system while at MIT, where he and Marvin Minsky organized and directed the Artificial Intelligence Project. He also made fundamental contributions to the concept of timesharing in the late1950s. McCarthy became interested in Artificial Intelligence (AI) while studying at Princeton University, in particular, the formalization of common-sense reasoning. He earned a B.S. degree from Caltech and a Ph.D. at Princeton, both in mathematics. In 1971, he received the ACM Turing Award. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Science.