Meir M. “Manny” Lehman was a professor in the School of Computing Science at Middlesex University. From 1972 to 2002 he was a Professor and Head of the Computing Department at Imperial College London. His research contributions include the early realization of the software evolution phenomenon and the eponymous Lehman’s laws of software evolution.
Lehman studied mathematics as an undergraduate at Imperial College London where he was involved in the design of the Imperial College Computing Engine’s Digital Computer Arithmetic Unit. He spent a year at Ferranti in London before working at Israel’s Ministry of Defense from 1957 to 1964. From 1964 to 1972 he worked at IBM’s research division in Yorktown Heights, NY where he studied program evolution with Les Belady. The study of IBM’s programming process gave the foundations for Lehman’s laws of software evolution. 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 Middlesex University.
