RIP George A. Miller
Online sources are announcing that Prof. George A. Miller, the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of Psychology Emeritus at Princeton University, died yesterday, July 22, 2012, at the age of 92. Previously on the faculty of Harvard University from which he received his doctorate in 1946, Miller co-founded the seminal Center for Cognitive Studies at Harvard with Jerome Bruner in 1960. Undergraduate students have almost always been introduced to Miller's work via his famous 1956 lecture, "The magical number seven, plus or minus two: Some limits on our capacity for processing information," published in the Psychological Review. In Toronto in 2003, he received the APA's highest honor, the Outstanding Lifetime Achievement in Psychology Award. I took the photo on the right at the ceremony bestowing the award on Miller. At the time of his award, the American Psychological Association noted that Miller was a pioneer in psycholinguistics as an independent research area, had contributed fundamental ideas to the study of language and cognition, and had established the Princeton Cognitive Science Laboratory in 1986 as well as served as the principal investigator in developing WordNet, an online lexical database of English at Princeton (APA Monitor in Psychology, February, 2003, p. 65). Miller himself served as the president of APA in 1969.
