George A. Miller was a pioneering psychologist who fundamentally reshaped the scientific understanding of human cognition through his revolutionary work establishing cognitive psychology as a distinct discipline. Born on February 3, 1920 in Charleston, West Virginia, he earned his B.A. and M.A. in speech from the University of Alabama before completing his M.A. and Ph.D. in psychology at Harvard University in 1944 and 1946. His distinguished academic career spanned several prestigious institutions including Harvard University where he chaired the Psychology Department until 1969, followed by a significant tenure at Rockefeller University from 1967 to 1981. In 1979, he joined Princeton University as the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of Psychology, where he established the Cognitive Science Laboratory in 1986 and directed the McDonnell-Pew Program in Cognitive Science.
Miller's groundbreaking contributions fundamentally transformed psychology by establishing cognitive science as a legitimate field of study, famously declaring his interest in the mind by 'coming out of the closet' in his research approach. His seminal 1956 paper 'The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two' revolutionized understanding of human short-term memory capacity and became one of the most influential works in psychological science. In 1960, he co-founded the Harvard Center for Cognitive Studies with Jerome Bruner, creating the first institute dedicated to what would become known as cognitive science. His innovative collaboration with Noam Chomsky on mathematical linguistics established foundational principles for psycholinguistics, and his later development of WordNet created an essential lexical database that remains a critical research tool in computational linguistics.
Miller's intellectual leadership extended through his presidency of the American Psychological Association in 1969 and his influential keynote address at the first convention of the Association for Psychological Science in 1989. He received numerous prestigious honors including the National Medal of Science in 1991, election to the National Academy of Sciences in 1962, and honorary doctorates from Yale, Columbia, and Oxford Universities. His work fundamentally shifted psychological research beyond behaviorist methods to embrace information processing models of the mind, recognizing that 'the human mind works a lot like a computer.' Miller's enduring legacy continues through the cognitive science field he helped establish, which now integrates psychology, linguistics, computer science, and neuroscience to advance our understanding of human cognition.
