Obit watch: October 26th, 2011.

I’ve been holding back on this one until I found a reliable source.

John McCarthy, influential computer scientist, passed away on Monday. NYT obit.

Dr. McCarthy may not have had the same level of fame as Dennis Ritchie or Steve Jobs, but his influence was still significant. He co-founded the legendary MIT A.I. Lab – indeed, he was one of the early pioneers of artificial intelligence in general – developed LISP, and later went on to found the Stanford AI Lab as well.

At Stanford, he influenced folks like Wozniak, Joba, and Whitfield Diffie (one of the inventors of public-key cryptography).

Dr. McCarthy was one of the unsung heroes of the early hacker culture. We seem to be losing more and more of them.

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