title: George E. Collins
text: # George E. Collins
  
  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, Delaware University, and North Carolina State University.
  
  ## Selected publications
  
  | G60. | George E. Collins: A Method for Overlapping and Erasure of Lists, Commun. ACM, volume 3, number 12, 1960. |
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  | G75. | George E. Collins: Quantifier elimination for the elementary theory of real closed fields by cylindrical algebraic decomposition, Second GI Conf. Automata Theory and Formal Languages, Springer LNCS 33, 1975. |
  