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John McCarthy was born in Boston, Massachusetts on September 4th, 1927.
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John graduated from Belmont High School two years early and was accepted for his undergraduate degree at Caltech. -
McCarthy was able to skip the first two years of math curriculum by teaching himself college-level math earlier. He was suspended from Caltech for not attending physical education courses. But after serving in the U.S. army was re-admitted and graduated in 1948
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McCarthy attended Princeton for graduate school, where he received a Ph.D in mathematics after his dissertation titled "Projection Operators and partial differential equations".
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McCarthy would transfer from Dartmouth to MIT to work as a professor in mathematics.
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At the Dartmouth conference in the summer of 1956, John McCarthy would coin the term 'artificial intelligence' and launch the field of AI.
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McCarthy proposed a hypothetical computer program known as the 'advice taker'. This program uses logic to represent information in a computer and not just as the subject matter of another program. This would inspire work on future logic programming.
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McCarthy served on a committee that would eventually develop ALGOL 60. A part of the ALGOL programming language family. He would also then work to develop international standards in programming and informatics.
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This is a form of automatic memory management, where the collector attempts to reclaim memory that was allocated by the program but no longer referenced. This was done to solve issues within Lisp
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John realized that recursive statements could be extended to use symbolic expressions, which led to the creation of Lisp. This would become the language of choice for AI applications after its publication.
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McCarthy was one of the first people to suggest the usage of utility computing. This is where computing power and specific applications could be sold through the utility business model. This has been developed today with cloud computing.
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McCarthy developed a chess program to play against Soviet Union counterparts. His team lost two games and drew two games.
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Circumscription is a non-monotonic logic method that formalizes the common sense assumption that things are expected unless otherwise specified.
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Proposed a hypothetical space fountain in which a tower was kept vertical by the outward force of a stream of pellets propelled from Earth on a conveyor belt that will also return them.
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McCarty Receives national medal of science in mathematical, statistical, and computational sciences.
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John McCarthy died at his Stanford home on October 24, 2011.