800px john mccarthy stanford

John McCarthy

  • Straight out of the womb

    John is born in Boston, Massachusetts
  • Cal-Tech Math

    Graduates from Cal-Tech with B.S. in Mathematics
  • Princeton Math

    Ph.D in Mathematics from Princeton
  • Bell Labs

    John began working at Bell Labs
  • Artificial what?

    First thoughts of Artificial intelligence during a research project.
  • Writing

    Wrote 'Program With Common Sense' that led to the invention of Lisp. Its popularity went down in the 1990's. Since then, in the 21st century, it has made a comeback especially in the open source community.
  • Teaching

    Began teaching at MIT
  • Timesharing System

    McCarthy began a timesharing system through his consultancy at BBN (Bolt Beranek and Newman) with J.C.R. Licklider and Edward Fredkin. It began working months after.
  • Chess On!

    McCarthy challenged a group at Moscow ITEP (Institute for Theoretical and Experimental Physics) to a chess match. The moves were exchanged by a telegram. This received lots of media attention.
  • AI project

    Starts a research project in Stanford. They finally had the equipment and funding for this project.
  • A.M. Turing

    Received the A.M. Turing Award of the Association for Computing Machinery
  • Research Excellence Award

    For his research on AI
  • IJCAI Award

    For his research on AI
  • Kyoto

    Wins Kyoto Prize for his study on AI
  • Medal Of Science

    For his research on Artificial Intelligence
  • Ben Franklin Medal

    received for "multiple contributions to the foundations of artificial intelligence and computer science including the development of the LISP language, the invention of time-sharing interactive programming, and key developments in the application of formal logic to commonsense reasoning."
  • RIP

    Dies in his home in Sanford