John McCarthy

John McCarthy was born in Boston, Massachusetts on September 4th, 1927 and died in Stanford, California on October 24th, 2011. He attended both Princeton University and California Institute of Technology to receive a BS of Mathematics, and a PhD in Mathematics. As for academic awards, he won the ACM Turing Award in 1971, the Kyoto Prize in 1988, the National Medal of Science in 1990, and the 1985 Computer Pioneer Award "for LISP and artificial intelligence".

The main thing John McCarthy is known and credited for is working with artificial intelligence and coining that term now used today. Though he did not invent the concept, he researched it quite a bit. His achievements in the field include developing the commonsense aspects. His work impacted the evolution of computer science as it identified that artificial intelligence could be a powerful field and was the initiation for what it is today. He also provided AI with the important factor of knowledge and reasoning.

Another thing he is known greatly for is inventing the programming language LISP in 1958. This was important as the language had "great flexibility due to its expressive power", according to Britannica.

Some more minor things he did included founding the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Library, developing the time-sharing concept, and inventing the method of circumscription using non-monotonic reasoning.

The most interesting thing I found while researching my superhero is that when McCarthy was developing Elephant 2000, a programming language, he postponed the deployment date by 15 years - once to 2005 and the other time to 2015.