John mccarthy stanford

ESOC Timeline

By Ryliew22

  • Birth of John McCarthy

    John McCarthy was born in Boston, Massachusetts on September 4th, 1927.

  • Acceptance into CalTech

    Acceptance into CalTech
    John graduated from Belmont High School two years early and was accepted for his undergraduate degree at Caltech.

  • Received B.S. in mathematics from 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

  • Received Ph.D in mathematics from Princeton

    McCarthy attended Princeton for graduate school, where he received a Ph.D in mathematics after his dissertation titled "Projection Operators and partial differential equations".

  • Becomes professor at MIT

    McCarthy would transfer from Dartmouth to MIT to work as a professor in mathematics.

  • Coined the term 'artificial intelligence'

    At the Dartmouth conference in the summer of 1956, John McCarthy would coin the term 'artificial intelligence' and launch the field of AI.

  • Proposed the 'Advice Taker'

    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.

  • Served on an ACM ad hoc committee

    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.

  • Invention of 'garbage-collection' methods

    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

  • Publication of Lisp

    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.

  • Publicly suggested utility computing

    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.

  • Kotok-McCarthy

    McCarthy developed a chess program to play against Soviet Union counterparts. His team lost two games and drew two games.

  • Received Turing Award

    https://amturing.acm.org/award_winners/mccarthy_1118322.cfm

  • Developed Circumscription

    Circumscription is a non-monotonic logic method that formalizes the common sense assumption that things are expected unless otherwise specified.

  • Space Fountain Idea

    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.

  • Received Kyoto Award

    https://www.kyotoprize.org/en/laureates/john_mccarthy/

  • Received National Medal of Science

    McCarty Receives national medal of science in mathematical, statistical, and computational sciences.

  • Receives Benjamin Franklin Medal

    https://news.stanford.edu/pr/03/mccarthy618.html

  • Death

    John McCarthy died at his Stanford home on October 24, 2011.