Carolyn Talcott (born June 14, 1941) is an American computer scientist known for work in formal reasoning, especially as it relates to computers, cryptanalysis and systems biology.

She is currently the program director of the Symbolic Systems Biology group at SRI International.

[5] Talcott married John McCarthy (computer scientist) and had a son.

[6] Carolyn was born to Howard Talcott and Harriet Louise Mitchell who were Presbyterians from Idaho.

Her dissertation, The Essence of RUM: A Theory of the Intensional and Extensional Aspects of LISP-Type Computation, was supervised by Solomon Feferman.