George Armitage Miller
Roger N. Shepard · Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society: Held at Philadelphia for Promoting Useful Knowledge · 2014
3 FEBRUARY 1920 . 22 JULY 2012MY FIRST EXPOSURE TO GEORGE MILLER was during my 1951-55 graduate studies at yale. two psychology colloquia that most inspired me at yale were both given by george. one was on his soon-to-become famous the magic Number seven, plus or minus two, which he presented, without notes, and with all elegance and dramatic flair of a professional actor. i wondered: Had he committed his entire Psychological Review manuscript to memory? His other colloquium presentation was on his tour de force study, with patricia Nicely, on frequencies of auditory confusions among sixteen consonant phonemes under many different conditions of noise and filtering. it still stands, today, as most extensive and orderly set of confusion data known to me, and it provided me with data that later enabled me to demonstrate, most fully, revelatory power of nonmetric methods of multidimensional scaling and clustering i was subsequently developing at Bell laboratories in 1960s.Meanwhile, when it came time for defense of my 1955 doctoral dissertation (on during paired-associates learning), yale's psychology faculty faced a problem: apart from those already on my dissertation committee, there was no mathematically inclined member left to serve on examining committee. so, members of department took unusual step of bringing in a suitable examiner from another university. they chose Harvard's george miller, who had so impressed yale department with quantitative brilliance of his two recently presented colloquia. (incidentally, approach i had taken in my dissertation was eventually to lead both to my 1962 invention of nonmetric multidimensional scaling and, later, to my 1987 empirical establishment and mathematical derivation of a universal law of generalization for psychological science.)After i had spent a year extending my dissertation work on generalization (as a National academy of sciences-National research Council postdoctoral research associate), george invited me to join him at Harvard, as a postdoctoral fellow for following academic years 1956-58. that was an exciting time to be in Cambridge area. Dick Neisser and i shared an office/lab adjacent to george's office in basement of Harvard's memorial Hall. When george's first submission to Scientific American was then accepted for publication, george (half-jokingly) told me this was part of his recently conceived mmf (or make miller famous) plan. Noam Chomsky had given george a prepublication manuscript of his Syntactic Structures, many sections of which george had spread out across a table for close study and some sections of which i, too, was perusing with great interest. i was also having my first experience in computer programming, on univac that had just been given to Harvard. i also taught, one-on-one, an introduction to psychology for graduate students in other to sole philosophy student who required that course that year: susan sontag. What with Harvard's Departments of psychology and social relations, and nearby mit, BBN, and lincoln labs, there were many young researchers who were beginning to advance psychological science in new directions. along with miller and Neisser, there were many others whose contributions would subsequently be recognized by election to National academy of sciences-including marvin minsky, Duncan luce, David green, John swets, philip teitelbaum, roger Brown, more senior J. C. r. licklider, frederick mosteller, and then Harvard graduate students george sperling and saul sternberg. several of us regularly met at mit in an informal evening group we called the pretzel twist. and some of us were privileged to meet informally with J. robert oppenheimer, during his psychology-sponsored William James lectures at Harvard. at end of these two years at Harvard, george facilitated my participation in santa monica workshop by allen Newell and Herbert simon on their new computer simulation approach to building of cognitive theories of human problem solving. …