RIP: John McCarthy, the computer scientist best known for coining the term “Artificial Intelligence” and inventing the Lisp programming language, has reportedly passed away at the age of 84.
McCarthy contributed to the creation of MIT’s Artificial Intelligence lab, Project MAC, in the 1950s. In 1962, he left MIT for Stanford, where he set up the Stanford AI Laboratory, a contemporary and rival of Project MAC.
McCarthy created Lisp as a programming language for AI applications, inventing garbage collection — a form of automatic memory management — in the process. It’s still used by several programming languages today.
For his work in AI, McCarthy won the 1971 Turing Award and the 1991 National Medal of Science.
He taught at Princeton, Dartmouth and MIT during his career, but ended up at Stanford, where he was a professor from 1962 until his retirement in 2000.
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