"null0" · CC BY-SA 2.0

McCarthy coined the term "artificial intelligence" in his proposal for the 1956 Dartmouth workshop that founded the field, then spent his career giving it its tools: he created the Lisp programming language, still in use today, and originated the concept of automatic garbage collection now standard across modern software. Based for decades at Stanford, he also helped popularize time-sharing computing and won the 1971 Turing Award for his foundational contributions to AI.