John McCarthy, professor emeritus in computer science and founder of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL), died on Monday in his Stanford home, according to a University statement. He was 84.

Whitfield Diffie, a researcher at SAIL, told the New York Times that “no one is more influential” than McCarthy in the field of artificial intelligence.

In fact, McCarthy has even been credited for the first use of the term “artificial intelligence” in print when it appeared in a proposal he had written in 1956 for a summer research conference while teaching mathematics at Dartmouth.

From there, he would go on to become a leader in the area of computer science — moving to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1958, creating the world’s second-oldest computer programming language, LISP, that same year and developing garbage collectors, a way to automatically remove superfluous lines of code from a computer’s random access memory, in 1959.

While McCarthy briefly served as an assistant professor at Stanford in 1953, he made the Farm his permanent home when he returned in 1962. Two years later, he founded SAIL, which was funded in part by the Pentagon. Scientists have yet to accomplish the lab’s initial goal — to build a functional artificial intelligence system in 10 years — but the lab has been responsible for advancements in robotics, computer vision and natural language.

McCarthy was recognized for his contributions to computer science, having been awarded the A.M. Turning Award in 1971, the Kyoto Prize in 1988 and the National Medal of Science in 1990.

He retired from Stanford in 2001.

“He could be blunt, but John was always kind and generous with his time, especially with students. And he was sharp until the end,” Edward Feigenbaum, professor emeritus of computer science, told the Stanford Report. “He was always focused on the future. Always inventing, inventing, inventing. That was John.”

– Kurt Chirbas