Meir "Manny" Lehman,

FREng Fellowship of the Royal Academy of Engineering (FREng) is an award and fellowship for engineers who are recognised by the Royal Academy of Engineering as being the best and brightest engineers, inventors and technologists in the UK and from arou ...

(24 January 1925 – 29 December 2010) was a professor in the School of Computing Science at

Middlesex University Middlesex University London (legally Middlesex University and abbreviated to MDX) is a public research university based in Hendon, northwest London, England. The university also has campuses in Dubai and Mauritius. The name of the university is ...

. From 1972 to 2002 he was a Professor and Head of the Computing Department at

Imperial College London Imperial College London, also known as Imperial, is a Public university, public research university in London, England. Its history began with Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, Prince Albert, husband of Queen Victoria, who envisioned a Al ...

. His research contributions include the early realisation of the

software evolution Software evolution is the continual development of a piece of software after its initial release to address changing stakeholder and/or market requirements. Software evolution is important because organizations invest large amounts of money in the ...

phenomenon and the eponymous

Lehman's laws of software evolution In software engineering, the laws of software evolution refer to a series of laws that Lehman and Belady formulated starting in 1974 with respect to software evolution. The laws describe a balance between forces driving new developments on one ha ...

Career

Lehman was born in Germany on 24 January 1925 and emigrated to England in 1931. He studied

mathematics Mathematics is a field of study that discovers and organizes methods, Mathematical theory, theories and theorems that are developed and Mathematical proof, proved for the needs of empirical sciences and mathematics itself. There are many ar ...

as an undergraduate at

where he was involved in the design of the

Imperial College Computing Engine ICCE I and ICCE II were digital computers built at the Imperial College Department of Mathematics in the post-war period. Computing engines ICCE I The first Imperial College Computing Engine, ICCE I, was constructed by Sidney Michaelson, Ton ...

's Digital Computer Arithmetic Unit. He spent a year at

Ferranti Ferranti International PLC or simply Ferranti was a UK-based electrical engineering and equipment firm that operated for over a century, from 1885 until its bankruptcy in 1993. At its peak, Ferranti was a significant player in power grid system ...

in London before working at Israel's Ministry of Defense from 1957 to 1964. From 1964 to 1972 he worked at

IBM International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...

's research division in Yorktown Heights, NY where he studied program evolution with

Les Belady LES or Les may refer to: People * Les (given name) * Les (surname) * L.E.S. (producer), hip hop producer Space flight * Launch Entry Suit, worn by Space Shuttle crews * Launch escape system, for spacecraft emergencies * Lincoln Experimental ...

. The study of IBM's programming process gave the foundations for

. In 1972 he returned to Imperial College where he was Head of Section and later Head of Department (1979–1984). Lehman remained at Imperial for some thirty years until 2002 when he moved to the School of Computing Science at

. After retiring from Middlesex he moved to Jerusalem, Israel, where he died on 29 December 2010.

Awards and honours

Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering Fellowship of the Royal Academy of Engineering (FREng) is an award and Scholarship, fellowship for engineers who are recognised by the Royal Academy of Engineering as being the best and brightest engineers, inventors and technologists in United K ...

(1989) * Fellow of the ACM (1994) * Harlan D. Mills Award (2001)

References

*M.M. Lehman. "Programs, life cycles, and laws of software evolution", ''

Proceedings of the IEEE The ''Proceedings of the IEEE'' is a monthly peer-reviewed scientific journal published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). The journal focuses on electrical engineering and computer science. According to the ''Journa ...

'', pages 1060–1076, September 1980 * Laszlo Belady, M. M. Lehman: A Model of Large Program Development. IBM Systems Journal 15(3): 225–252 (1976)

External links

FEAST PublicationsIEEExplore

Salon.com ''Salon'' is an American politically progressive and liberal news and opinion website created in 1995. It publishes articles on U.S. politics, culture, and current events. Content and coverage ''Salon'' covers a variety of topics, includ ...

, 2002. *
Manny Lehman's Home PageLehman's official academic archive
{{DEFAULTSORT:Lehman, Meir Manny 1925 births 2010 deaths Academics of Middlesex University Academics of the Department of Computing, Imperial College London British computer scientists British software engineers Software engineering researchers 1994 fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery