Timeline: John McCarthy

Sep 4, 1927

Born

John McCarthy was born September 4th, 1927 in Boston Massachusetts. His father John Patrick McCarthy a carpenter and fisherman with Irish Catholic decent. His mother Ida Glatt McCarthy a journalist and a social worker.

1944

Mathematician at California Institute of Technology

At the age of 17 years old McCarthy was accepted into the California Institute of Technology, and as a freshman began in graduate level classes.

1949

Received B.S. in Mathematics

McCarthy was an incredible Mathematician before acceptance into CAL Tech he had taught himself Calculus.

1949

Moved and received Ph.D

McCarthy moved to Princeton where he received his Ph.D. in Mathematics in 1951.

1949

Met John von Neumann and Marvin Lee

Founded AI-LAB at MIT with their collaboration

Period: 1949 to 1951

Assistant Professor at Princeton

Collaborated with John Von Neumann in his thinking of crating a computer in a way similar to our own human brain evolution, in a process of feedback/interaction. Soon to be "Programs with Common Sense".

Period: 1951 to 1953

Assistant Professor at Stanford

1955

A Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence

Collaborated with Marvin Minsky along with Claude Shannon from Bell Labs and Nathaniel Rochester. Here he could bring the term “Artificial intelligence” into the public eye and established a handful of researches in the new field including himself and Minsky.

1955

Assistant Professorship at Dartmouth College

1959

Programs with Common Sense Published

McCarthy suggested that for a computer to have human level intelligence, it needed a formal representation of human logic systems. An idea that would have far reaching implications.

1960

Unveiled LISP

Programming language based of FORTRAN essential to AI programming.

1961

CTSS (Compatible Time-Sharing System)

Met Lester Donald Earnest who was at the time designing the governments air defense system SAGE. In it, users could get simultaneous access to the system through remote consoles. This lead to his thinking on the “time-sharing” of a computers power, eventually giving rise to CTSS

1962

Back to California

In 1962 McCarthy moved back to California accepting a full professorship at the Department of Mathematics at Stanford quickly changing to a professor in the Department of Computer Science.

1965

Helped create SAIL

(Stanford Institute of Artificial Intelligences or Stanford AI Lab) While at SAIL he began to dabble in the world of robotics to test his theories regarding AI. He supervised research regarding computer vision, speech recognition, and manipulation.

1972