George Armitage Miller

Posted: September 2018

The Linguistic Society of America regrets to remark on the passing of George Armitage Miller. He passed away on July 22, 2012. An LSA member since 1950 and a life member as well, Miller was one of the best known psychologists of the 20th century and played a large role in the founding the psycholinguistics subfield of linguistics. He was also influential in turning the field of psychology in general away from behaviorism and towards cognition. Perhaps best known for his paper on working memory, "The magical number seven, plus or minus two", Miller also wrote the seminal book Language and Communication (1951) and pioneered Wordnet.

Miller taught at Harvard University, the Rockefeller University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Princeton, where he had been a professor emeritus since 1990.  At Princeton he founded the Cognitive Science Laboratory.

A further obituary for George A. Miller can be read here.