John McCarthy [1], Turing Award winner and one of the luminaries of computer science, died yesterday. I’ve spent the evening after the SPLASH Educators’ Symposium listening to McCarthy’s OOPSLA 2007 keynote speech (mp3) [2].
[3]Dick Gabriel introducing Stanford professor McCarthy's keynote at OOPSLA'07 in Montreal
John McCarthy was one of the earliest collaborators of my doctoral advisor, Robert “Corky” Cartwright. They worked on first-order programming logic in 1978 (Recursive programs as functions in a first order theory [4]) and 1979 (First order programming logic [5]).
McCarthy was on Corky’s committee. In Germany, the doctoral advisor is called “Doktorvater”, doctor father. If I haven’t quite lost a doctoral grandfather, I have at least lost a doctoral granduncle.
