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	John McCarthy was born in Boston in 1927.
He graduated
from Caltech in mathematics in 1948 and received the PhD in
mathematics in 1951 from Princeton University.
McCarthy remained at Princeton as an instructor for two years
after his PhD and then went to Stanford University as an acting assistant
professor.  He moved to Dartmouth College in 1955, to M.I.T. in
1957 and back to Stanford in 1962 where he remains.

	While still at Caltech in 1949, McCarthy was influenced
by attending the Hixon Symposium on Cerebral Mechanisms in Behavior
to begin thinking about how machines could be made to think.  He
found this a difficult problem and first published on it in 1956
in {\it Automata Studies}, which he co-edited with Claude Shannon, then
of Bell Telephone Laboratories.

	While at Dartmouth his attention shifted from pure mathematics to
artificial intelligence and computer science.  He coined the term
artificial intelligence in connection with the Dartmouth Summer Research
Project on Artificial Intelligence which he organized for the summer of
1956.  This meeting was the first occasion that united most of the
individuals thinking about how to make computers behave intelligently.

	Taking ideas from the IPL language of Allen Newell and Herbert
Simon and from Fortran developed by John Backus at IBM, McCarthy began work
on an algebraic programming language for computation with symbolic
expressions.  The first result was the Fortran List Processing Language of
Gelernter and Gerberich, but the main outcome was the development of LISP
in 1958.

	While at M.I.T. starting in 1957, McCarthy proposed
a new way of using computers, time-sharing 
In order to make time-sharing practical, it was necessary to
add to the computers of that day features that have since become
standard.  These include memory protection,
memory relocation,
replacing all instructions that can stop the computer by interrupts
to the operating system,
direct input-output
instructions in ``user mode'',
all input and output
resulting in interrupts,
McCarthy was the first to propose that an integrated package of such
features was required for time-sharing.

	The first time-sharing system to actually operate was
developed under McCarthy's direction for the Digital Equipment Corporation
PDP-1 computer at Bolt Beranek and Newman.  The project was sponsored by
NIH, and McCarthy's co-authors were J.C.R. Licklider, Sheldon Boilen and
Edward Fredkin.  The system began working in the summer of 1962.

	McCarthy has always regarded his work on LISP, mathematical
theory of computation, and time-sharing as secondary to his
main scientific interest --- artificial intelligence.

	McCarthy's greatest scientific contribution is the ``reasoning
program'' approach to artificial intelligence pioneered in his 1960 paper
(given at a 1958 conference) ``Programs with common sense''.  This
approach involves representing facts about the world and the problem the
program is to solve as sentences of mathematical logic.  The program then
must use directed search procedures in order to deduce that a certain
course of action will achieve the goal.

	In the 1960s McCarthy developed the ``situation calculus''
formalism for representing the effects of actions.  Much of the
work in making AI programs that plan sequences of actions to achieve
goals is based on situation calculus or its variants.

	In the 1970s McCarthy developed the ``circumscription'' method
of non-monotonic reasoning as an supplement to logical deduction
in reasoning programs.  It has proved the most widely accepted of the
three methods proposed in that decade, and many papers have followed
McCarthy's 1980 paper.  (1980, 1985).

	In the 1960s and 70s McCarthy developed logical formalisms for
representing facts about people's and programs' knowledge.  This field has
recently become popular.
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