People forget for how long Lisp had an impact on AI, even outside GOFAI techniques; LeCun's early neural networks were written in Lisp: https://leon.bottou.org/publications/pdf/sn-1988.pdf

The story goes as, John McCarthy was applying for an assistant professorship position at MIT. MIT told him, but we have here Norbert Wiener who was a renowned mathematician at the time and had published cybernetics some time ago, in which he talks about agents interacting with the environment and feedback control, sort of modern computation-based AI. McCarthy changed the name from cybernetics to AI, and focused on symbolic systems and logic. The approach was generally not successful.

Some people consider that the logic-based approach to AI pioneered in this conference contributed to an (what we now call) AI winter. People like John Pierce of Bell Labs, a very influential figure in government, defunded research in computation-based AI such as for speech recognition (he wrote articles, saying, basically, researchers pursuing these techniques are charlatans).

There is no major algorithm or idea in undergrad machine learning textbooks named after these people. There are other people from that era.