George A. Miller

George Armitage Miller (born February 3, 1920 in Charleston, West Virginia) is the author of one of the most highly cited papers in psychology, "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two" This paper suggests that seven (plus or minus two) is the magic number that characterizes people's memory performance on random lists of letters, words, numbers, or almost any kind of meaningful familiar item. According to a widely cited multi-method empirical study, Miller is the 20th most historically important psychologist of the 20th century. Miller received his PhD in 1946 from Harvard University, based on military research he did during the war on the topic of speech perception, under the supervision of Stanley Smith Stevens. In 1960, Miller...