Merrill Meeks Flood | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1908 |
| Died | 1991(1991-00-00) (aged 82–83) |
| Occupation | Mathematician |
| Known for | Game theory,Prisoner's dilemma |
Merrill Meeks Flood (1908 – 1991[1]) was an American mathematician, notable for developing, withMelvin Dresher, the basis of thegame theoreticalPrisoner's dilemma model of cooperation and conflict while being atRAND in 1950 (Albert W. Tucker gave the game its prison-sentence interpretation, and thus the name by which it is known today).[2]
Flood received an MA in mathematics at theUniversity of Nebraska, and a PhD atPrinceton University in 1935 under the supervision ofJoseph Wedderburn, for the dissertationDivision by Non-singular Matric Polynomials.
In the 1930s he started working atPrinceton University, and after the War he worked at theRand Corporation,Columbia University, theUniversity of Michigan[3] and theUniversity of California.
In the 1950s Flood was one of the founding members ofTIMS and its second President in 1955. End 1950s he was among the first members of theSociety for General Systems Research. In 1961, he was elected President of theOperations Research Society of America (ORSA), and from 1962 to 1965 he served as Vice President of theInstitute of Industrial Engineers. In 1983 he was awarded ORSA'sGeorge E. Kimball Medal.
He was elected to the 2002 class ofFellows of theInstitute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences.[4]
Flood is considered a pioneer in the field ofmanagement science andoperations research, who has been able to apply their techniques to problems on many levels of society. According to Xu (2001) "as early as 1936–1946, he applied innovativesystems analysis to public problems and developed cost-benefit analysis in the civilian sector and cost effectiveness analysis in the military sector".[3]
In the 1940s Flood publicized the nameTraveling salesman problem (TSP) within the mathematical community at mass. He publicized the TSP in 1948 by presenting it at the RAND Corporation. According to Flood "when I was struggling with the problem in connecting with a school-bus routing study in New Jersey".[5]
Even more important, as far as common usage goes, Flood himself claimed to have coined the term "software" in the late 1940s.[6]
Equally at home in his original field of the mathematics of matrices and in the pragmatic trenches of the industrial engineer, his research addressed an impressive array of operations research problems. His 1953 paper on theHitchcock transportation problem is often cited, but he also published work on the traveling salesman problem, and an algorithm for solving the von Neumann hide and seek problem.[3]
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