John McCarthy

The inventor of Lisp who coined the term 'artificial intelligence' and founded its first laboratory.

Specifications & Metrics

era

1927 – 2011

Core Principles & Analysis

• He coined 'artificial intelligence' for the 1956 Dartmouth summer project.
• Lisp (1958) was his language for symbolic computation; time-sharing was his answer to scarce machines.
• He also proposed the 'advice taker', an early program that would reason from declarative knowledge.