George E. Collins

George E. Collins (born on January 10, 1928 in Stuart, Iowa – and died on November 21, 2017 in Madison, Wisconsin) was an American mathematician and computer scientist. He is the inventor of garbage collection by reference counting^[G60] and of the method of quantifier elimination by cylindrical algebraic decomposition.^[G75]

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.