John McCarthy was one of the founders of the field of artificial intelligence. He served as Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at Stanford University, where his personal site collects his papers on logical AI, situation calculus, circumscription, and common-sense reasoning - work built on the idea that logic can represent knowledge in a computer’s memory.
McCarthy co-authored the 1955 “Proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence,” which gave the field its name. Listed as “J. McCarthy, Dartmouth College” alongside M. L. Minsky, N. Rochester, and C. E. Shannon, the proposal stated the conjecture that “every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it.”
He also invented Lisp, introduced in his 1960 paper “Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine,” a language that became foundational to AI research for decades.
For business readers, McCarthy is best understood as the person who both named artificial intelligence and helped set its early research agenda around formal logic and reasoning.