John mccarthy computer scientist biography worksheet

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John McCarthy September 4, — October 24, was an American computer scientist and cognitive scientist. He was one of the founders of the discipline of artificial intelligence. McCarthy spent most of his career at Stanford University. 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. Both parents were active members of the Communist Party during the s, and they encouraged learning and critical thinking. Before he attended high school, McCarthy became interested in science by reading a translation of , Whys , a Russian popular science book for children.

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McCarthy graduated from Belmont High School two years early [ 9 ] and was accepted into Caltech in 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.

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 with his dissertation " Projection operators and partial differential equations ", under the supervision of Donald C.

After short-term appointments at Princeton and Stanford University , McCarthy became an assistant professor at Dartmouth in A year later, he moved to MIT as a research fellow in the autumn of In , he became a full professor at Stanford, where he remained until his retirement in