Professor John McCarthy is a mathematician, computer scientist, and cognitive scientist; a pioneer in mathematical theory of computation, artificial intelligence (he created the term Artificial Intelligence), and computer programming languages: he invented (some say discovered) Lisp in 1958, one of the oldest and highest level languages, arguably the oldest language in active use today, and maybe the oldest high-level language overall, along with Fortran. Languages of similar vintage are Fortran and Cobol. As of 2001 Jan 1, he is Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, Stanford University, USA.