# John McCarthy John McCarthy (1927–2011) was the American computer scientist who **coined the term "artificial intelligence"** and organized the 1956 Dartmouth Workshop that founded the field. He created the Lisp programming language (1958), which dominated AI research for decades, pioneered computer time-sharing, and made foundational contributions to [[Symbolic AI]] and formal reasoning (the "common sense" knowledge-representation program). He spent most of his career at Stanford, where he founded the AI Lab, and received the Turing Award in 1971. McCarthy was a committed proponent of the symbolic, logic-based approach to intelligence and an optimist about machines achieving human-level reasoning. He is a foundational figure of the discipline rather than a political one. ## See Also - Dartmouth Workshop — which he organized and named the field at - [[Symbolic AI]] — the paradigm he championed - [[Artificial Intelligence]] — the term he coined