Not so long ago we woke up to the news that Steve Jobs the CEO of apple is dead. A few days later we heard about the death of Dennis Richie, father of the C programming language. Then on the 24th of October, we were greeted with the sad news that John McCarthy, the Inventor of LISP programming language and father of modern day Artificial Intelligence, is dead.
John wass born in Boston, Massachusetts on September 4, 1927 to an Irish immigrant father and a Lithuanian Jewish immigrant mother, John Patrick and Ida Glatt McCarthy. He was responsible for coining the term Artificial Intelligence in his 1955 proposal for the 1956 Dartmouth Conference and was the inventor of the LISP programming language.
McCarthy believed AI should be interactive, allowing for a give and take similar to AI simulators like Eliza. His own labs were run in an open, free-wheeling fashion, encouraging exploration and argument. He won the Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery in 1972 and the National Medal of Science in 1991. McCarthy championed mathematical logic for Artificial Intelligence. In 1958, he proposed the advice taker, which inspired later work on question-answering and logic programming.
His wiki page can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_McCarthy_(computer_scientist)
Our heart goes to the family of John McCarthy and we pray that the tech world does not loose any other genius before this year runs out.
