George Joseph Laurer III (September 23, 1925 – December 5, 2019) was an American engineer for IBM at Research Triangle Park in North Carolina.

[1] Laurer recovered from polio which he contracted as a teenager,[1] nonetheless, while in 11th grade, he was drafted into the U.S. Army during World War II.

[1] By 1969, he had been promoted to senior engineer / scientist and moved to the company's offices in Research Triangle Park in North Carolina.

[1] This change was accepted by IBM management and Laurer then worked with Woodland and mathematician David Savir to develop and refine the details.

[3][6] The Universal Product Code has bit patterns at the beginning, middle and end of the barcode called "guard bars" and these have been interpreted as the digits 666.

[8] When he first developed the code, Laurer noticed that the digit 6 appeared several times and that this might be interpreted as the number of the Beast, as his daughter was studying the Book of Revelation.