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brag[s85,jmc]		Self-praise for various purposes

	John McCarthy was born in Boston in 1927.  His father was
born in Ireland, immigrated in 1917, and worked at various trades
including carpentry but spent the middle part of his career as
a trade union organizer.  His mother was born in Lithuania of
Jewish parents, immigrated at the age of six, graduated from
Goucher College in Baltimore and worked as a journalist and
as a social worker.

	McCarthy attended high school in Los Angeles, graduated
from Caltech in mathematics in 1948 and received the PhD in
mathematics in 1951 from Princeton University.
  His thesis was on partial differential
equations, and his adviser was Solomon Lefschetz.


	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 February 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 Automata Studies, which he co-edited with Claude Shannon, then
of Bell Telephone Laboratories.

	While at Dartmouth his attention shifted mainly from
pure mathematics to artificial intelligence, and 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 and groups thinking
about how to make computers behave intelligently.

	Taking ideas from the IPL language of Allen Newell
and Herbert Simon, 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.

	LISP introduced many new ideas to computer science.  These
include recursive use of conditional expressions as a form of
programming, the use of list structure representing S-expressions
for both program and data permitting convenient programs that
operate on programs, the use of Church's lambda notation for
representing functions and the first meta-cyclic interpreter.
Within a few years, LISP became the main programming language
used for artificial intelligence and computation with algebraic
expressions.  It is now the second oldest (after Fortran) programming
language in general use.  In the last few years several companies
(Xerox, Symbolics, LMI and Texas Instruments) have marketed computers
specialized for LISP.  Numerous companies specialize in producing
LISP compilers for standard machines, and the Defense Department
has made Common LISP a standard along with ADA for programs
for computers imbedded in military equipment.

	Besides using LISP as a practical programming language,
McCarthy based on it a mathematical theory of computation.  This
theory permits the writing of specifications for programs in
languages of mathematical logic and permits formal computer checked
proofs that programs meet their specifications.  McCarthy's 1961
approach to this problem has been developed by him and others
into one of the two main approaches to proving programs correct.
In the hands of Robert Boyer and J Moore of the University of
Texas it has led to powerful interactive theorem provers that
are on the verge of real usefulness to computer programmers and
to mathematicians.  (The other approach was proposed by Robert
Floyd in 1965, although it had been used in unpublished special
cases by both Allan Turing and John von Neumann).
McCarthy developed the mathematical theory of computation in
series of papers in the 1960s and 1970s.

	While at M.I.T. starting in 1957, McCarthy proposed
a new way of using computers, time-sharing.  Rather than preparing
programs using key punches and then submitting decks of punched
cards, time-sharing involves each user having a terminal in his
office directly connected to the computer.  To the user a
time-sharing computer behaves as if he had a computer of his
own.  He prepares programs and data using editor programs and
keeps the information permanently in the computer's disk storage.

	McCarthy began proposing that M.I.T. switch to this way
of using computers in 1957, but the first presently available
document is an internal memo dated January 1, 1959.  In it
McCarthy proposed that M.I.T. enlist IBM's co-operation in
developing a time-sharing system for the forthcoming IBM 7090.
McCarthy's proposals were further developed by others and
contributed to the CTSS time-sharing system for the IBM 7090
built under the direction of Fernando J. Corbato.

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

	His first approach was through automata theory and information
theory starting in 1949.  It involved a measure of the amount of
information about its environment and automaton could collect.
Since it didn't seem to related to actual common sense knowledge
and behavior it was abandoned without publication.  The second
approach led to the 1956 paper ``Inversion of functions defined
by Turing machines'' but was abandoned for the same reason.  In
1957 McCarthy started on a chess program and invented the alpha-beta
and killer heuristics, which are still used today in chess programs.
However, his talents were more suited to theory than to making large
programs, and he didn't continue his work on games except to direct
student work.

	McCarthy's major contribution to artificial intelligence is
the reasoning program approach pioneered in his 1960 paper (given
at a 1958 conference) ``Programs with common sense''.