John McCarthy

The man who is now considered the 'father of AI' was born in Boston, Massachusetts on September 4th, 1927. In 1944, at the age of 17, he was admitted to the California Institute of Technology, also known as Caltech. He moved to Princeton University, where in 1951 he graduated with a PhD in math. He then taught at many different schools, including Princeton, Stanford, and Dartmouth, where at a conference in 1956, he created the term "artificial intelligence". He created the Artificial Intelligence Project with Marvin Minsky at MIT, and in 1958, McCarthy created the programming language LISP, the second oldest one in existence, which is still used for programming AI to this day. In 1966, he hosted a chess tournament against people in Russia via a computer telegraph. John McCarthy won the Turing Award in 1971 and retired in 2000. He died at the age of 84 on October 24, 2011.

Minor / Major contributions to Computer Science

1. He invented the term "Artificial Intelligence" which is still used today to describe it.

2. He created the programming language LISP, which continues to be used by computer scientists across the globe.

3. He hosted the first online chess match, which showed the world another thing computers could do.