John McCarthy was a professor emeritus of computer science at Stanford and a giant in the field of artificial intelligence. He is credited with coining the term "artificial intelligence" and subsequently went on to define the discipline for more than five decades from his post at Stanford. In his career, he developed the programming language LISP, played computer chess via telegraph with opponents in Russia and invented computer time-sharing – an advance that greatly improved the efficiency of distributed computing and predated the era of cloud computing by decades. The Association of Computing Machinery honored McCarthy with the A. M. Turing Award in 1971, the highest recognition in computer science. He received the Kyoto Prize in 1988 and the National Medal of Science in 1990, the nation's highest technical award. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.