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 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.