John McCarthy was born in Boston in 1927 and was raised there
and in Los Angeles.  He received the B.S. in mathematics in 1948 from
the California Institute of  Technology and the Ph.D.  from Princeton
University in 1951 also  in mathematics.  He has taught  at Princeton
Dartmouth, M.I.T. and at Stanford.  He has been Professor of Computer
Science  since  1962  and  Director  of  the  Artificial Intelligence
Laboratory at Stanford since 1965.

        He  is  one  of  the  founders  of   artificial  intelligence
research, emphasizing epistemological  problems, i.e. the  problem of
what  information  and  what  modes  of  reasoning  are  required for
intelligent behavior.   He originated  the LISP  programming language
for  computing with  symbolic expressions,  was one  of the  first to
propose and  design time-sharing computer  systems, and  pioneered in
using  mathematical  logic  to  prove  the  correctness  of  computer
programs.  He has also  written papers on the social  implications of
computer and other technology.

        He  received the  A.M. Turing  award of  the  Association for
Computing  Machinery  in  1971  for  his  contributions  to  computer
science.

        His  recent  work  includes  formalization  of  non-monotonic
reasoning whereby people  and computers draw  conjectural conclusions
by assuming that complications are absent from a situation.