John McCarthy
Coined the term "artificial intelligence" in 1955, organized the field's founding 1956 Dartmouth workshop, and invented Lisp.
John McCarthy (1927–2011) coined the phrase "artificial intelligenceAI (Artificial Intelligence)AI is the field of building systems that perform tasks normally requiring human intelligence — reasoning, perception, language, and decision-making." in a 1955 proposal for a summer research project at Dartmouth College — deliberately choosing a neutral name over alternatives like "cybernetics," which was already associated with a different research group. The 1956 Dartmouth workshop he organized with Claude ShannonClaude ShannonEngineer who founded information theory, giving the field the mathematical vocabulary — bits, entropy, channel capacity — that loss functions and compression are still built on., Marvin MinskyMarvin MinskyCo-founder of the MIT AI Lab and a founding figure of the field — his 1969 book with Seymour Papert exposed the perceptron's limits and helped trigger the first AI winter., and Nathaniel Rochester is conventionally treated as the field's founding event, even though it produced no breakthroughs itself — mostly a room of people agreeing the question was worth a name and a research program.
McCarthy's more lasting technical contribution was Lisp, a programming language he designed in 1958 built around symbolic expressions and recursive functions. Lisp became the dominant language of symbolic AI research for three decades — the expert systems and logic-based reasoning that defined the field before statistical machine learningMachine Learning (ML)Machine learning is the practice of writing programs that learn a function from data, via a loss function and an optimizer, instead of following hand-written rules. took over — and introduced ideas (garbage collection, conditionals as expressions, functions as data) that show up in most modern languages.
He remained a committed advocate of symbolic, logic-based AI throughout his career, a position that put him philosophically at odds with the connectionist approach that would eventually dominate the field.
See also: Marvin MinskyMarvin MinskyCo-founder of the MIT AI Lab and a founding figure of the field — his 1969 book with Seymour Papert exposed the perceptron's limits and helped trigger the first AI winter., Claude ShannonClaude ShannonEngineer who founded information theory, giving the field the mathematical vocabulary — bits, entropy, channel capacity — that loss functions and compression are still built on.
Learn more: History & Landscape · Expert SystemExpert SystemAn expert system encodes a human expert's domain knowledge as hand-written if-then rules plus an inference engine, the dominant AI approach of the 1970s-80s. · Wikipedia: John McCarthy
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Walter Pitts
Self-taught logician who, with Warren McCulloch, co-authored the 1943 paper modeling neurons as logic gates — the mathematical starting point for every neural network.
Marvin Minsky
Co-founder of the MIT AI Lab and a founding figure of the field — his 1969 book with Seymour Papert exposed the perceptron's limits and helped trigger the first AI winter.