# Fame.am profile — machine-readable export
# Canonical URL: https://fame.am/person/john-mccarthy
# Generated: 2026-09-07T19:57:53.321Z

schema: https://schema.org/Person
url: "https://fame.am/person/john-mccarthy"
name: "John McCarthy"
slug: "john-mccarthy"
description: "He named the field. In 1956, McCarthy coined \"artificial intelligence\" at a Dartmouth workshop and spent the next half-century building the tools — Lisp, time-sharing, garbage collection — that made thinking machines possible."
tagline: "American computer scientist and cognitive scientist (1927-2011)"
image: "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:FilePath/John_McCarthy_Stanford.jpg"
gender: "male"
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category:
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profileType:
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  entityType: "https://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q39631"
birthDate: "1927-09-04"
deathDate: "2011-10-24"
livingStatus: "DECEASED"
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# bio (long form, separated for readability)
bio: |
  Born September 4, 1927, McCarthy came up through American computer science at a moment when machines were calculators and the idea they might reason was science fiction. He co-authored the 1956 Dartmouth proposal that christened AI as a discipline, gathering a small circle of researchers who believed cognition could be formalized. He invented Lisp, the symbolic language that became AI's native tongue, and pioneered time-sharing and garbage collection — infrastructural breakthroughs that reshaped computing itself. McCarthy spent most of his career at Stanford, where he continued pushing the boundaries of what machines could know. He won the Turing Award in 1971, the National Medal of Science, and the Kyoto Prize before his death on October 24, 2011.