1999 Fellow Awards Recipient
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For his co-founding of the fields of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and timesharing systems, and for major contributions to mathematics and computer science.
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John McCarthy
John McCarthy created the LISP programming system while at MIT, where he and Marvin Minsky organized and directed the Artificial Intelligence Project. He also developed the concept of time-sharing in the late 1950's. McCarthy became interested in artificial intelligence while studying at Princeton University, in particular, the formalization of common sense knowledge.
He earned a B.S. degree in mathematics from Caltech and a Ph.D. in mathematics from Princeton. In 1971, he received the ACM Turing Award. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Science.