John McCarthy

There is something poetic about the fact that all of artificial intelligence bears that name because of a mathematician who in 1955 simply needed a title for a research proposal. John McCarthy, born in Boston in 1927, was a young professor at Dartmouth when he decided that thinking machines deserved their own field, their own name, and the right gathering of minds to ignite it. While other colleagues talked about "cybernetics" or "thinking machines," he chose something new: "artificial intelligence." That name changed history, even though at the time it sounded more like ambition than reality.

In the summer of 1956 he organized the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence, a gathering of a few dozen researchers that is now considered the formal birth of AI as a discipline. Two years later, in 1958, he created Lisp, the second oldest programming language in history (only behind Fortran): designed to manipulate symbol lists, it became for decades the native language of AI researchers. McCarthy also conceived in the late 1950s the idea of computer time-sharing, allowing multiple users to use a single machine simultaneously, a direct precursor of what we now call the cloud.

He founded the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL) in 1963 and led it for years, training generations of researchers. For all that work he received the 1971 Turing Award, the equivalent of a Nobel Prize in computing, along with the United States National Medal of Science and the Kyoto Prize. He died on October 24, 2011, at 84, but left an entire field bearing his name, even if few people know it.

What strikes me most about McCarthy is not just that he invented the term that fills today's headlines: it is that he had the clarity to understand that building a discipline required naming it, gathering the right people, and creating the tools it needed. Today, every time you message Claude or use any AI tool, you are standing, without knowing it, on the name he chose nearly seventy years ago.