John McCarthy was an American computer scientist and cognitive scientist. McCarthy was one of the founders of the discipline of artificial intelligence. He coined the term "artificial intelligence" (AI), developed the Lisp programming language family, significantly influenced the design of the ALGOL programming language, popularized timesharing, and was very influential in the early development of AI. McCarthy received many accolades and honors, such as the Turing Award for his contributions to the topic of AI, the United States National Medal of Science, and the Kyoto Prize. He was born on September 4, 1927 in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. McCarthy graduated from Caltech in 1948, then gained his PhD in mathematics at Princeton in 1951. He was an instructor at Princeton from 1951 until 1953 when he came to Stanford as an assistant professor. In 1955, he left for Dartmouth and then for MIT before returning to Stanford for good in 1962 as a full professor of computer science. He retired Jan. 1, 2001. The Association of Computing Machinery honored McCarthy with the A. M. Turing Award in 1971, the highest recognition in computer science. He received the Kyoto Prize in 1988 and the National Medal of Science in 1990, the nation's highest technical award. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.