George H. Mealy

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 taught at Harvard.^[8]

Selected publications

• 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

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. George H. Mealy at the Mathematics Genealogy Project