John McCarthy

John McCarthy (born September 4, 1927, Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.—died October 24, 2011, Stanford, California) was an American mathematician and computer scientist who was a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence (AI); his main research in the field involved the formalization of commonsense knowledge. McCarthy received a bachelor’s degree in mathematics (1948) from the California Institute of Technology and a doctorate in mathematics (1951) from Princeton University, where he briefly taught. He also held professorships...