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George E. Collins (January 10, 1928 in Stuart, Iowa – November 21, 2017 in Madison, Wisconsin) was an American mathematician and computer scientist. He is the inventor of garbage collection by reference counting and of the method of quantifier elimination by cylindrical algebraic decomposition.

He received his PhD from Cornell University in 1955. He worked at IBM, the University of Wisconsin–Madison (1966–1986) Ohio State University, RISC-Linz, University of Delaware, and North Carolina State University.

Selected publications

References

1. ^ "In Memoriam: Professor Emeritus George E. Collins". Archived from the original on 2018-09-09. Retrieved 2017-12-12.
2. Jones, Richard; Lins, Rafael (1996), Garbage collection: algorithms for automatic dynamic memory management, Wiley, p. 40, ISBN 9780471941484, The first, though cumbersome and error-prone, reference counting technique was described by H. Gelertner, J.R. Hansen, and C.L. Gerberich but the standard reference counting algorithm is due to George Collins .
3. Caviness, Bob F.; Johnson, Jeremy R., eds. (1998), Quantifier elimination and cylindrical algebraic decomposition, Springer, p. v, ISBN 9783211827949, A symposium on Quantifier Elimination and Cylindrical Algebraic Decomposition was held October 6–8, 1993 ... the symposium celebrated the 20th anniversary of George Collins' discovery of Cylindrical Algebraic Decomposition (CAD) as a method for Quantifier Elimination (QE) for the elementary theory of real closed fields (Collins 1973b), and was devoted to the many advances in this subject since Collins' discovery.
4. "George Collins - the Mathematics Genealogy Project".

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