Birthday of John McCarthy (1927) – Lisp and Artificial Intelligence

John McCarthy coined the term ‘Artificial Intelligence’ in 1955. He invented the Lisp programming language (1958), which became the language of AI research for decades. Lisp’s foundation is the lambda calculus (Alonzo Church) – a formal system for computability. McCarthy also developed the concept of ‘garbage collection’ (automatic memory management) and advocated for time‑sharing. He won the Turing Award in 1971. His work shows how mathematical logic (recursive functions, symbolic computation) can be turned into running code.