George H. Mealy (December 31, 1927 – June 21, 2010 in Scituate, Massachusetts)[1] was an American mathematician and computer scientist who invented the namesake Mealy machine, a type of finite state transducer. He was also a pioneer of modular programming,[2][3] one of the lead designers of the IPL-V programming language,[4] and an early advocate of macro processors in assembly language programming.[5]

Mealy went to Harvard University, where he was active in radio as business manager for WHRB.[6] He graduated in 1951 with an A.B., and at that time began working for Bell Laboratories.[7] He later worked at the RAND Corporation[8] then IBM[9] and taught at Harvard.[10]

Selected publications

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  • Mealy, George H. (1955), "A method for synthesizing sequential circuits", Bell System Technical Journal, 34 (5): 1045–1079, doi:10.1002/j.1538-7305.1955.tb03788.x, MR 0073450.
  • Mealy, George H. (1967), "Another Look at Data" (PDF), Proceedings of the November 14-16, 1967, Fall Joint Computer Conference (AFIPS Fall '67), New York, NY, USA: ACM, pp. 525–534, doi:10.1145/1465611.1465682, S2CID 18146748.

References

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  1. ^ George H. Mealy obituary, tributes.com, retrieved 2015-04-20.
  2. ^ Jackson, Michael (2002), "JSP in Perspective", in Broy, Manfred; Denert, Ernst (eds.), Software Pioneers: Contributions to Software Engineering (PDF), Springer, pp. 480–493, doi:10.1007/978-3-642-59412-0_30.
  3. ^ Jackson, Michael (2000), Tomayko, James E. (ed.), "The Origins of JSP and JSD: a Personal Recollection" (PDF), Anecdotes, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, 22 (2): 61–63, doi:10.1109/MAHC.2000.841138.
  4. ^ Simon, Herbert A.; Newell, Allen (January 1986), "Information Processing Language V on the IBM 650" (PDF), IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, 8 (1): 47–49, doi:10.1109/MAHC.1986.10020, S2CID 18999471.
  5. ^ Walden, David (2014), "Macro memories, 1964–2013" (PDF), TUGboat, 35 (1): 99–109.
  6. ^ "WHRB Officers", The Harvard Crimson, February 17, 1951.
  7. ^ "Contributors to This Issue", Bell System Technical Journal, 38 (2): 606–610, 1959, doi:10.1002/j.1538-7305.1959.tb03904.x.
  8. ^ Mealy, George (May 1961). "Letters to the editor: Boolean rings". Communications of the ACM. 4 (5). doi:10.1145/366532.366590.
  9. ^ "Author Biographies". IBM Systems Journal. 5 (1): 52. 1966. Retrieved 11 January 2024.
  10. ^ George H. Mealy at the Mathematics Genealogy Project