John McCarthy

John McCarthy was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on September 4, 1927, to an Irish immigrant father and a Lithuanian Jewish immigrant mother, 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. His mother died in 1957.

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 popular Russian science book for children. 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.

McCarthy graduated from Belmont High School two years early 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. He was suspended from Caltech for failure to attend physical education courses. He then served in the US Army and was readmitted, receiving a Bachelor of Science (BS) in mathematics in 1948.

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.

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.

McCarthy declared himself an atheist in a speech about artificial intelligence at Stanford Memorial Church. Raised as a Communist, he became a conservative Republican after a visit to Czechoslovakia in 1968 after the Soviet invasion. He died at his home in Stanford on October 24, 2011.