The man who coined the term "artificial intelligence" and helped define the field for more than five decades, John McCarthy was known for his intense focus, his self-deprecating sense of humor and a personal philosophy he called "radical optimism." His positive outlook was such that he believed "everything will be OK—even if people don't take my advice," daughter Susan McCarthy recalls.
McCarthy, a professor emeritus of computer science who won the A.M. Turing Award in 1971, the Kyoto Prize in 1988 and the National Medal of Science in 1990, died in his home at Stanford on October 24. He was 84.
With an undergraduate degree from the California Institute of Technology and a PhD from Princeton, McCarthy came to Stanford in 1953 as an assistant professor. In 1955, he left for Dartmouth, where he proposed a two-month, 10-person summer research conference on "artificial intelligence"—the first published use of the term. The gathering became a watershed in computer science.
In 1958, McCarthy developed the computer programming language LISP, still the programming language of choice for artificial intelligence. In the late '50s and early '60s, he developed the concept of computer time-sharing. McCarthy co-founded the MIT Artificial Intelligence Project and what became the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab, serving as director at Stanford from 1965 until 1980.
Still later he developed the first "hand-eye" computer system in which a computer was able to "see" blocks via a video camera and control a robotic arm to complete simple stacking and arrangement exercises.
Ed Feigenbaum, professor emeritus of computer science, says his colleague was "kind and generous with his time, especially with students, and he was sharp until the end. . . . Always inventing, inventing, inventing. That was John."
McCarthy is survived by his third wife, Carolyn Talcott; children Susan, Sarah and Timothy; two grandchildren; his first wife, Martha Coyote; and a brother, Patrick. His second wife, Vera Watson, died in 1978 in a mountain-climbing accident attempting to scale Annapurna in Nepal.
Andrew Myers is the associate director of communications for the Stanford School of Engineering. Jamie Beckett contributed to this story.
