Yesterday, John McCarthy (photo© null0) died. He was one of the giants of computer science and cognitive science.
John McCarthy was born on September 4, 1927, in Boston, Massachusetts. The young John showed an aptitude for mathematics when he was very young and when he was a teenager, he studied on his own textbooks of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). In 1948, McCarthy earned a B.S. in mathematics at Caltech, in 1951, he obtained a Ph.D., again in mathematics, at Princeton University.
After teaching for short periods at the universities of Princeton, Stanford, Dartmouth, and MIT, in 1962 John McCarthy became a professor at Stanford, where he taught until 2000, when he retired. When he was at MIT, he was already nicknamed “Uncle John”.
In 1955, John McCarthy introduced the concept of artificial intelligence, and in 1962, he created the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. In 1958, McCarthy invented the Lisp (LISt Processor) language, from which over the decades various derivatives have been created. In 1961, McCarthy introduced the concept of time-sharing, which had ups and downs but regained importance in recent years thanks to increased computer power.
For his contribution in the field of artificial intelligence, in 1971 John McCarthy received the Turing Award.
In 1982, John McCarthy proposed the space fountain, a type of space elevator that doesn’t require that the structure is in geosynchronous orbit.
In 1991, John McCarthy received the National Medal of Science in mathematics, statistics, and computer science. In 2003, he received the Benjamin Franklin Medal for computer science and cognitive science.
John McCarthy often wrote comments on various topics on the Internet, and you can find some of his ideas in his pages on the Stanford website. There’s also his science fiction story “The Robot and the Baby”, which anticipates some current aspects of the Internet, such as social networking.
John McCarthy was married to Vera Watson, who died in 1978 in an attempt to climb Mount Annapurna I.
Less than two weeks after the death of Dennis Ritchie, computer science lost another giant. John McCarthy had ideas that were innovative to the point that they are still under development.
