John McCarthy

Named the field of artificial intelligence and created the Lisp language.

Biography

An American computer scientist who organized the 1956 Dartmouth workshop that gave artificial intelligence its name and launched it as a discipline. He designed Lisp, which became the dominant language for AI research for decades, and argued throughout his career for formal logic as the right vehicle for representing commonsense knowledge.

Key contributions

• Coined the term "artificial intelligence" and co-organized the 1956 Dartmouth workshop.
• Designed the Lisp programming language.
• Advocated and developed logic-based approaches to representing commonsense knowledge.