John McCarthy (computer scientist)

John McCarthy was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on September 4, 1927, to an Irish immigrant father and a Lithuanian Jewish immigrant mother,{{cite book |last1=Shasha |first1= Dennis |last2=Lazere |first2=Cathy |year=1998 |title=Out of Their Minds: The Lives and Discoveries of 15 Great Computer Scientists |publisher=Springer |page=23 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=-0tDZX3z-8UC&pg=PA23 |access-date=February 27, 2016|isbn= 9780387982694 }} John Patrick and Ida (Glatt) McCarthy. The family was obliged to relocate frequently during the Great Depression, until McCarthy's father found work as an organizer for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers in Los Angeles, California. His father came from Cromane, a small fishing village in County Kerry, Ireland.{{cite news |title=Leading academic who coined the term 'artificial intelligence' |url=http://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/people/leading-academic-who-coined-the-term-artificial-intelligence-1.11243 |newspaper=The Irish Times |access-date=January 28, 2016 |language=en-US}} His mother died in 1957.{{cite web |title=History of Computers and Computing, Birth of the modern computer, Software history, LISP of John McCarthy |url=http://history-computer.com/ModernComputer/Software/LISP.html |website=history-computer.com |access-date=January 28, 2016 |archive-date=January 3, 2020 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200103081331/https://history-computer.com/ModernComputer/Software/LISP.html |url-status=dead }}

Both parents were active members of the Communist Party during the 1930s, and they encouraged learning and critical thinking. Before he attended high school, McCarthy became interested in science by reading a translation of 100,000 Whys, a Russian popular science book for children.{{cite web |last1=Nilsson |first1=Nils J. |title=A Biographical Memoir |url=http://www.nasonline.org/publications/biographical-memoirs/memoir-pdfs/mccarthy-john.pdf |website=National Academy of Sciences |access-date=2022-02-20}} He was fluent in the Russian language and made friends with Russian scientists during multiple trips to the Soviet Union, but distanced himself after making visits to the Soviet Bloc, which led to him becoming a conservative Republican.{{cite web |last1=Earnest |first1=Les |title=Soviet takeover of Czechoslovakia in 1968 witnessed by John McCarthy; Letter to Les Earnest dated Nov. 1, 1968 |url=https://web.stanford.edu/~learnest/jmc/czech.pdf |url-status=dead |archive-url=http://web.archive.org/web/20230607162119/https://web.stanford.edu/~learnest/jmc/czech.pdf |archive-date=2023-06-07 |access-date=2022-02-20 |website=Brags and Blunders of Lester Donald Earnest}}

McCarthy graduated from Belmont High School two years early{{cite news |last=Woo |first=Elaine |date=October 28, 2011 |title=John McCarthy dies at 84; the father of artificial intelligence |url=http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-john-mccarthy-20111027,0,7137805.story |work=Los Angeles Times }} and was accepted into Caltech in 1944.

He showed an early aptitude for mathematics; during his teens, he taught himself college math by studying the textbooks used at the nearby California Institute of Technology (Caltech). As a result, he was able to skip the first two years of math at Caltech.{{cite journal |last1=Hayes |first1=Patrick J. |last2=Morgenstern |first2=Leora |title=On John McCarthy's 80th Birthday, in Honor of his Contributions |journal=AI Magazine |volume=28 |issue=4 |pages=93–102 |publisher=Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence |year=2007 |url=http://www.aaai.org/ojs/index.php/aimagazine/article/view/2063/2057 |access-date=November 24, 2010 |archive-date=September 23, 2011 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110923152610/http://www.aaai.org/ojs/index.php/aimagazine/article/view/2063/2057 |url-status=dead }} He was suspended from Caltech for failure to attend physical education courses.{{cite book |last1=Williams |first1=Sam |title=Arguing A.I.: The Battle for Twenty-first-Century Science |date=March 5, 2002 |publisher=AtRandom |isbn=978-0812991802 |url-access=registration |url=https://archive.org/details/arguingai00samw }} He then served in the US Army and was readmitted, receiving a Bachelor of Science (BS) in mathematics in 1948.{{cite web |url=http://amturing.acm.org/award_winners/mccarthy_0239596.cfm |title=A. M. Turing award: John McCarthy, United States – 1971 |publisher=ACM |author=Lester Earnest |access-date=September 5, 2012}}

It was at Caltech that he attended a lecture by John von Neumann that inspired his future endeavors.

McCarthy completed his graduate studies at Caltech before moving to Princeton University, where he received a PhD in mathematics in 1951 with his dissertation "Projection operators and partial differential equations", under the supervision of Donald C. Spencer.{{Cite book|last=McCarthy|first=John|url=https://catalog.princeton.edu/catalog/2702240|title=Projection operators and partial differential equations|date=1951|language=en}}

After short-term appointments at Princeton and Stanford University, McCarthy became an assistant professor at Dartmouth in 1955.

A year later, he moved to MIT as a research fellow in the autumn of 1956. By the end of his years at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) he was already affectionately referred to as "Uncle John" by his students.{{citation |url=http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/world/readfile?fk_files=36095&pageno=34 |title=Hackers, Heroes of the Computer Revolution |author=Steven Levy |page=34 |publisher=Gutenberg.org}}

In 1962, he became a full professor at Stanford, where he remained until his retirement in 2000.

McCarthy championed mathematics such as lambda calculus and invented logics for achieving common sense in artificial intelligence.

File:John McCarthy (2314859532).jpg

John McCarthy is one of the "founding fathers" of artificial intelligence, together with Alan Turing, Marvin Minsky, Allen Newell, and Herbert A. Simon. McCarthy, Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester and Claude E. Shannon coined the term "artificial intelligence" in a proposal that they wrote for the famous Dartmouth conference in Summer 1956. This conference started AI as a field.{{cite journal |last1=Roberts |first1=Jacob |title=Thinking Machines: The Search for Artificial Intelligence |journal=Distillations |date=2016 |volume=2 |issue=2 |pages=14–23 |url=https://www.sciencehistory.org/distillations/magazine/thinking-machines-the-search-for-artificial-intelligence |access-date=March 20, 2018 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180819152455/https://www.sciencehistory.org/distillations/magazine/thinking-machines-the-search-for-artificial-intelligence |archive-date=August 19, 2018 |url-status=dead}} (Minsky later joined McCarthy at MIT in 1959.)

In 1958, he proposed the advice taker, which inspired later work on question-answering and logic programming.

In the late 1950s, McCarthy discovered that primitive recursive functions could be extended to compute with symbolic expressions, producing the Lisp programming language.{{cite journal |title=Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine, Pt I |last=McCarthy |first=John |date=April 1960 |journal=Communications of the ACM |volume=3 |issue=4 |pages=184–195 |doi=10.1145/367177.367199 |doi-access=free |citeseerx=10.1.1.422.5235 |s2cid=1489409}}

That functional programming seminal paper also introduced the lambda notation borrowed from the syntax of lambda calculus in which later dialects like Scheme based its semantics. Lisp soon became the programming language of choice for AI applications after its publication in 1960.

In 1958, McCarthy served on an Association for Computing Machinery ad hoc committee on Languages that became part of the committee that designed ALGOL 60. In August 1959 he proposed the use of recursion and conditional expressions, which became part of ALGOL.{{cite journal |last=McCarthy |first=John |date=August 1959 |title=Letter to the editor |journal=Communications of the ACM |volume=2 |issue=8 |pages=2–3 |doi=10.1145/368405.1773349 |s2cid=7196706}} He then became involved with developing international standards in programming and informatics, as a member of the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) Working Group 2.1 on Algorithmic Languages and Calculi,{{cite web |url=https://ifipwg21wiki.cs.kuleuven.be/IFIP21/Profile |title=Profile of IFIP Working Group 2.1 |last1=Jeuring |first1=Johan |last2=Meertens |first2=Lambert |author2-link=Lambert Meertens |last3=Guttmann |first3=Walter |date=August 17, 2016 |website=Foswiki |access-date=October 4, 2020}} which specified, maintains, and supports ALGOL 60 and ALGOL 68.{{Cite web |url=https://ifipwg21wiki.cs.kuleuven.be/IFIP21/ScopeEtc |title=ScopeEtc: IFIP21: Foswiki |last1=Swierstra |first1=Doaitse |last2=Gibbons |first2=Jeremy |author2-link=Jeremy Gibbons |last3=Meertens |first3=Lambert |author3-link=Lambert Meertens |date=March 2, 2011 |website=Foswiki |access-date=October 4, 2020}}

Around 1959, he invented so-called "garbage collection" methods, a kind of automatic memory management, to solve problems in Lisp.{{cite web |url=http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/recursive.html |title=Recursive functions of symbolic expressions and their computation by machine, Part I |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20131004215327/http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/recursive.html |archive-date=October 4, 2013 |access-date=November 24, 2013}}

During his time at MIT, he helped motivate the creation of Project MAC, and while at Stanford University, he helped establish the Stanford AI Laboratory, for many years a friendly rival to Project MAC.

McCarthy was instrumental in the creation of three of the very earliest time-sharing systems (Compatible Time-Sharing System, BBN Time-Sharing System, and Dartmouth Time-Sharing System). His colleague Lester Earnest told the Los Angeles Times:

{{Blockquote|text=The Internet would not have happened nearly as soon as it did except for the fact that John initiated the development of time-sharing systems. We keep inventing new names for time-sharing. It came to be called servers ... Now we call it cloud computing. That is still just time-sharing. John started it.|author=Elaine Woo|source=}}

In 1961, he was perhaps the first to suggest publicly the idea of utility computing, in a speech given to celebrate MIT's centennial: that computer time-sharing technology might result in a future in which computing power and even specific applications could be sold through the utility business model (like water or electricity).{{cite book |title=Architects of the Information Society, Thirty-Five Years of the Laboratory for Computer Science at MIT |editor1-first=Hal |editor1-last=Abelson |first1=Simson |last1=Garfinkel|isbn=978-0-262-07196-3 |publisher=MIT Press |year=1999 |page=1 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=Fc7dkLGLKrcC&pg=RA1-PA1|location=Cambridge}}The lecture, entitled "Time Sharing Computer Systems," is pp. 220-248 in [https://archive.org/details/managementcomput00gree Management and the Computer of the Future] (ed Martin Greenberger), published 1962, later reprinted as Computers and the world of the future (1965). This idea of a computer or information utility was very popular during the late 1960s, but had faded by the mid-1990s. However, since 2000, the idea has resurfaced in new forms (see application service provider, grid computing, and cloud computing).

In 1966, McCarthy and his team at Stanford wrote a computer program used to play a series of chess games with counterparts in the Soviet Union; McCarthy's team lost two games and drew two games (see Kotok-McCarthy).

From 1978 to 1986, McCarthy developed the circumscription method of non-monotonic reasoning.

In 1982, he seems to have originated the idea of the space fountain, a type of tower extending into space and kept vertical by the outward force of a stream of pellets propelled from Earth along a sort of conveyor belt which returns the pellets to Earth. Payloads would ride the conveyor belt upward.{{cite web |url=https://groups.google.com/forum/m/?hl=en#!topic/sci.space.tech/lxXD4mwuK9E |title=Space Bridge Short |last=McCarthy |first=John |date=July 31, 1994 |website=sci.space.tech Usenet newsgroup posts |publisher=Google Groups}}

McCarthy often commented on world affairs on the Usenet forums. Some of his ideas can be found in his sustainability Web page,{{cite web |last=McCarthy |first=John |date=February 4, 1995 |url=http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/ |title=Progress and its sustainability |publisher=formal.stanford.edu|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20131004221812/http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/ |archive-date=October 4, 2013 |access-date=November 24, 2013}} which is "aimed at showing that human material progress is desirable and sustainable". McCarthy was an avid book reader, an optimist, and a staunch supporter of free speech. His best Usenet interaction is visible in rec.arts.books archives. He actively attended San Francisco (SF) Bay Area dinners in Palo Alto of r.a.b. readers, called rab-fests. He went on to defend free speech criticism involving European ethnic jokes at Stanford.{{cite web |last=McCarthy |first=John |date=May 12, 1997 |url=https://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/rhf.html |title=Attempt at Censorship of Electronic Libraries at Stanford University in 1989 |publisher=formal.stanford.edu|access-date=December 5, 2023}}

McCarthy saw the importance of mathematics and mathematics education. His Usenet signature block (.sig) for years was, "He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense"; his license plate cover read, similarly, "Do the arithmetic or be doomed to talk nonsense."{{cite web |url=https://groups.google.com/forum/#!search/%22He$20who$20refuses$20to$20do$20arithmetic$20is$20doomed$20to$20talk$20nonsense%22 |title=He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense |type=Usenet newsgroup sci.environment search}}{{cite news |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/26/science/26mccarthy.html |title=John McCarthy, 84, Dies; Computer Design Pioneer |date=October 26, 2011 |work=The New York Times}} He advised 30 PhD graduates.{{cite web |url=http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/voy/museum/jmctree.html |date=April 21, 2012 |title=Tree of John McCarthy students for the Computer History Exhibits |publisher=infolab.Stanford.edu |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20131202233546/http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/voy/museum/jmctree.html |archive-date=December 2, 2013 |access-date=November 24, 2013}}

His 2001 short story "The Robot and the Baby"{{cite web |last=McCarthy |first= John |date=June 28, 2001 |url=http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/robotandbaby/robotandbaby.html |title=The Robot and the Baby |publisher=formal.stanford.edu |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20131004222119/http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/robotandbaby/robotandbaby.html |archive-date=October 4, 2013 |access-date=November 24, 2013}} farcically explored the question of whether robots should have (or simulate having) emotions, and anticipated aspects of Internet culture and social networking that became increasingly prominent during ensuing decades.{{cite web |url=http://wordswithmeaning.org/2011/10/the-death-of-true-tech-innovators-d-ritchie-j-mccarthy-yet-the-death-of-steve-jobs-overshadows-all/ |title=The Death of TRUE Tech Innovators D. Ritchie & J. McCarthy – Yet the Death of Steve Jobs Overshadows All |last=Thomson |first=Cask J. |date=October 26, 2011 |website=WordsWithMeaning blog |access-date= |archive-date=April 26, 2012 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120426195920/http://wordswithmeaning.org/2011/10/the-death-of-true-tech-innovators-d-ritchie-j-mccarthy-yet-the-death-of-steve-jobs-overshadows-all/ |url-status=dead }}

McCarthy was married three times. His second wife was Vera Watson, a programmer and mountaineer who died in 1978 attempting to scale Annapurna I Central as part of an all-women expedition. He later married Carolyn Talcott, a computer scientist at Stanford and later Scientific Research Institute (SRI) International.{{cite news |first=John |last=Markoff |date=October 25, 2011 |title=John McCarthy, 84, Dies; Computer Design Pioneer |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/26/science/26mccarthy.html |newspaper=The New York Times}}{{cite web |title=Biography of Carolyn Talcott |url=http://blackforest.stanford.edu/clt/bio.html |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20131202231926/http://blackforest.stanford.edu/clt/bio.html |archive-date=December 2, 2013 |publisher=Stanford University}}

McCarthy declared himself an atheist in a speech about artificial intelligence at Stanford Memorial Church.{{cite web | url=https://news.stanford.edu/news/1999/march17/mccarthy317.html#:~:text=McCarthy%20described%20himself%20as%20a,thought%20they%20were%20being%20bullied | title=Computer pioneer discusses atheism, artificial intelligence | date=January 23, 2023 }}{{cite web |title=About John McCarthy |url=http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/personal.html |publisher=Stanford University |access-date=February 1, 2013 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20131004213309/http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/personal.html |archive-date=October 4, 2013}}{{cite web |last=McCarthy |first=John |title=Commentary on World, US, and scientific affairs |url=http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/commentary.html |publisher=Stanford University |date=March 7, 2003 |quote=By the way I'm an atheist. |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20131004213311/http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/commentary.html |archive-date=October 4, 2013 |access-date=February 1, 2013}} Raised as a Communist, he became a conservative Republican after a visit to Czechoslovakia in 1968 after the Soviet invasion.{{cite web |url=https://web.stanford.edu/~learnest/jmc/ |title=Biographies of John McCarthy |publisher=Stanford University |access-date=February 14, 2016 |author=Earnest, Les |archive-date=June 11, 2016 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160611003431/https://web.stanford.edu/~learnest/jmc/ |url-status=dead }} He died at his home in Stanford on October 24, 2011.{{cite news |last=Myers |first=Andrew |title=Stanford's John McCarthy, seminal figure of artificial intelligence, dies at 84 |url=https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2011/10/stanfords-john-mccarthy-seminal-figure-artificial-intelligence-dies-84 |access-date=October 26, 2011 |newspaper=Stanford University News |date=October 25, 2011}}

In 1979 McCarthy wrote an articleMcCarthy, J. (1979) Ascribing mental qualities to machines. In: Philosophical perspectives in artificial intelligence, ed. M. Ringle. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press. entitled "Ascribing Mental Qualities to Machines". In it he wrote, "Machines as simple as thermostats can be said to have beliefs, and having beliefs seems to be a characteristic of most machines capable of problem-solving performance." In 1980 the philosopher John Searle responded with his famous Chinese Room Argument,{{cite journal |last=Searle |first=John R |year=1980 |title=Minds, brains, and programs |url=http://cogprints.org/7150/1/10.1.1.83.5248.pdf |journal=Behavioral and Brain Sciences |volume=3 |issue=3 |pages=417–457 |doi=10.1017/s0140525x00005756|s2cid=55303721 }} disagreeing with McCarthy and taking the stance that machines cannot have beliefs simply because they are not conscious. Searle argues that machines lack intentionality. A vast amount of literature {{example needed|date=May 2023}} has been written in support of one side or the other.

• Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery (1971)
• Kyoto Prize (1988)
• National Medal of Science (US) in Mathematical, Statistical, and Computational Sciences (1990){{cite web |url=https://www.nsf.gov/od/nms/recip_details.cfm?recip_id=233 |access-date=September 27, 2012 |title=President's National Medal of Science: Recipient Details 1990 |date=February 14, 2006 |publisher=National Science Foundation}}
• Inducted as a Fellow of the Computer History Museum "for his co-founding of the fields of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and timesharing systems, and for major contributions to mathematics and computer science" (1999){{cite web |author=CHM |title=John McCarthy – CHM Fellow Award Winner |url=http://www.computerhistory.org/fellowawards/hall/bios/John,McCarthy/ |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150403185009/http://www.computerhistory.org/fellowawards/hall/bios/John,McCarthy/ |archive-date=April 3, 2015 |access-date=March 30, 2015}}[http://www.computerhistory.org/fellowawards/hall/bios/John,McCarthy/] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150403185009/http://www.computerhistory.org/fellowawards/hall/bios/John,McCarthy/|date=April 3, 2015}}
• Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science from the Franklin Institute (2003)
• Inducted into IEEE Intelligent Systems' AI's Hall of Fame (2011), for the "significant contributions to the field of AI and intelligent systems"{{Cite journal |doi=10.1109/MIS.2011.64 |title=AI's Hall of Fame |url=http://www.computer.org/cms/Computer.org/ComputingNow/homepage/2011/0811/rW_IS_AIsHallofFame.pdf |journal=IEEE Intelligent Systems |volume=26 |issue=4 |pages=5–15 |year=2011 |access-date=September 4, 2015 |archive-date=December 16, 2011 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20111216235804/http://www.computer.org/cms/Computer.org/ComputingNow/homepage/2011/0811/rW_IS_AIsHallofFame.pdf |url-status=dead }}
• Named as one of the 2012 Stanford Engineering Heroes{{cite news |last=Beckett |first=Jamie |title=Stanford School of Engineering names new engineering heroes |url=http://news.stanford.edu/news/2012/december/engineering-school-heroes-120412.html |access-date=December 2, 2012 |newspaper=Stanford News |date=December 2, 2012}}

• McCarthy, J. 1959. {{webarchive |url=https://web.archive.org/web/20131004215444/http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/mcc59.html |date=October 4, 2013 |title="Programs with Common Sense"}}. In Proceedings of the Teddington Conference on the Mechanisation of Thought Processes, 756–91. London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office.
• McCarthy, J. 1960. {{webarchive |url=https://web.archive.org/web/20131004215327/http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/recursive.html |date=October 4, 2013 |title="Recursive functions of symbolic expressions and their computation by machine"}}. Communications of the ACM 3(4):184-195.
• McCarthy, J. 1963a "A basis for a mathematical theory of computation". In Computer Programming and formal systems. North-Holland.
• McCarthy, J. 1963b. Situations, actions, and causal laws. Technical report, Stanford University.
• McCarthy, J., and Hayes, P. J. 1969. {{webarchive |url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130825025836/http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/mcchay69.pdf |date=August 25, 2013 |title=Some philosophical problems from the standpoint of artificial intelligence}}. In Meltzer, B., and Michie, D., eds., Machine Intelligence 4. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 463–502.
• McCarthy, J. 1977. "Epistemological problems of artificial intelligence". In IJCAI, 1038–1044.
• {{cite journal |last1=McCarthy |first1=J |year=1980 |title=Circumscription: A form of non-monotonic reasoning |journal=Artificial Intelligence |volume=13 |issue=1–2 |pages=23–79 |doi=10.1016/0004-3702(80)90011-9}}
• {{cite journal |last1=McCarthy |first1=J |year=1986 |title=Applications of circumscription to common sense reasoning |journal=Artificial Intelligence |volume=28 |issue=1 |pages=89–116 |doi=10.1016/0004-3702(86)90032-9|citeseerx=10.1.1.29.5268 }}
• McCarthy, J. 1990. "Generality in artificial intelligence". In Lifschitz, V., ed., Formalizing Common Sense. Ablex. 226–236.
• McCarthy, J. 1993. "Notes on formalizing context". In IJCAI, 555–562.
• McCarthy, J., and Buvac, S. 1997. "Formalizing context: Expanded notes". In Aliseda, A.; van Glabbeek, R.; and Westerstahl, D., eds., Computing Natural Language. Stanford University. Also available as Stanford Technical Note STAN-CS-TN-94-13.
• McCarthy, J. 1998. "Elaboration tolerance". In Working Papers of the Fourth International Symposium on Logical formalizations of Commonsense Reasoning, Commonsense-1998.
• Costello, T., and McCarthy, J. 1999. "Useful counterfactuals". Electronic Transactions on Artificial Intelligence 3(A):51-76
• McCarthy, J. 2002. "Actions and other events in situation calculus". In Fensel, D.; Giunchiglia, F.; McGuinness, D.; and Williams, M., eds., Proceedings of KR-2002, 615–628.

{{Portal|Biography}}

• Christopher Strachey, filed a patent for time-sharing in early 1959
• Cornucopian
• Frame problem
• List of pioneers in computer science
• Kotok-McCarthy
• McCarthy 91 function
• McCarthy formalism
• Watson (computer)

{{Reflist|2}}

• Philip J. Hilts, Scientific Temperaments: Three Lives in Contemporary Science, Simon and Schuster, 1982. Lengthy profiles of John McCarthy, physicist Robert R. Wilson and geneticist Mark Ptashne.
• Pamela McCorduck, Machines Who Think: a personal inquiry into the history and prospects of artificial intelligence, 1979, second edition 2004.
• Pamela Weintraub, ed., The Omni Interviews, New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1984. Collected interviews originally published in Omni magazine; contains an interview with McCarthy.

{{Commons category|John McCarthy (computer scientist)|John McCarthy}}

{{Wikiquote|John McCarthy (computer scientist)|John McCarthy}}

• {{webarchive |url=https://web.archive.org/web/20131011125002/http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/ |date=October 11, 2013 |title=McCarthy's Stanford home page}}.
• {{DBLP|name=John McCarthy}}
• {{MathGenealogy |id=22145 |title=John McCarthy}}
• {{AIGenealogy |id=259 |title=John McCarthy}}
• [https://web.archive.org/web/20150220060339/http://cs.stanford.edu/jmc Celebration of John McCarthy's Accomplishments at Stanford University].
• [http://www.infoq.com/interviews/Steele-Interviews-John-McCarthy Interview with Guy Steele] conducted at OOPSLA 2008; Set of interviews:
• [http://purl.umn.edu/107476 Oral history interview with John McCarthy] at Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. McCarthy discusses his role in the development of time-sharing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He also describes his work in artificial intelligence (AI) funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency, including logic-based AI (Lisp) and robotics.
• [http://purl.umn.edu/107503 Oral history interview with Marvin Minsky] at Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. Minsky describes artificial intelligence (AI) research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), including the work of John McCarthy.
• [http://purl.umn.edu/107244 Oral history interview with Jack B. Dennis] at Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. Dennis discusses the work of John McCarthy on time-sharing, and the influence of DARPA's Information Processing Techniques Office on the development of time-sharing.
• [http://purl.umn.edu/107230 Oral history interview with Fernando J. Corbató] at Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. Corbató discusses computer science research, especially time-sharing, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), including John McCarthy and research on time-sharing.
• [https://www.nasonline.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/mccarthy-john.pdf National Academy of Sciences Biographical Memoir]

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