George E. Collins

George E. Collins (January 10, 1928 to November 21, 2017) was an American mathematician and computer scientist who invented garbage collection by reference counting and the method of quantifier elimination by cylindrical algebraic decomposition. He received his PhD from Cornell University in 1955 and worked at IBM, the University of Wisconsin-Madison from 1966 to 1986, Ohio State University, RISC-Linz, the University of Delaware, and North Carolina State University.