John McCarthy, a computer scientist long associated with Stanford University and a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence, died on Sunday, according to news reports and Tweets from the Stanford School of Engineering. He was 84.
Mr. McCarthy invented the programming language Lisp and was responsible for coining the term “artificial intelligence,” in a proposal for a conference on the topic at Dartmouth College in 1956. He received the A.M. Turing Award, given by the Association for Computing Machinery, in 1971 for his contributions to the field.
Mr. McCarthy earned a Ph.D. in mathematics from Princeton University in 1951 and became a full professor at Stanford in 1962. He retired in 2000 and had held emeritus status since then. He also held appointments at Princeton, Dartmouth, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
