Albert W. Tucker | |
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| Born | Albert William Tucker (1905-11-28)28 November 1905 Oshawa, Ontario, Canada |
| Died | 25 January 1995(1995-01-25) (aged 89) Hightstown, New Jersey, U.S. |
| Nationality | Canadian American |
| Alma mater | University of Toronto (BA,MA) Princeton University (PhD) |
| Known for | Tucker's lemma Karush–Kuhn–Tucker conditions Prisoner's dilemma Combinatorial linear algebra |
| Awards | John von Neumann Theory Prize (1980) |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Mathematician: Combinatorial topology Optimization |
| Institutions | Princeton University |
| Thesis | An Abstract Approach to Manifolds (1932[1]) |
| Doctoral advisor | Solomon Lefschetz[1] |
| Doctoral students | David Gale John R. Isbell Marvin Minsky John Forbes Nash Torrence Parsons Lloyd Shapley |
Albert William Tucker (28 November 1905 – 25 January 1995) was a Canadianmathematician who made important contributions intopology,game theory, andnon-linear programming.[2]
Albert Tucker was born inOshawa, Ontario, Canada, and earned hisB.A. at theUniversity of Toronto in 1928 and hisM.A. at the same institution in 1929.[3] In 1932, he earned hisPh.D. atPrinceton University under the supervision ofSolomon Lefschetz, with a dissertation entitledAn Abstract Approach to Manifolds.[4] In 1932–33 he was a National Research Fellow atCambridge,Harvard, and thenUniversity of Chicago.
Tucker then returned to Princeton to join the faculty in 1933, where he stayed until 1974. He chaired the mathematics department for about twenty years, one of the longest tenures. His extensive relationships within the field made him a great source for oral histories of the mathematics community.
In 1950, Albert Tucker gave the name and interpretation "prisoner's dilemma" toMerrill M. Flood andMelvin Dresher's model of cooperation and conflict, resulting in the most well-known game theoretic paradox.[5] He is also well known for theKarush–Kuhn–Tucker conditions, a basic result in non-linear programming, which was published in conference proceedings, rather than in a journal.
In the 1960s, he was heavily involved in mathematics education, as chair of theAP Calculus committee for the College Board (1960–1963), through work with the Committee on the Undergraduate Program in Mathematics (CUPM) of theMAA (he was president of the MAA in 1961–1962), and through manyNSF summer workshops for high school and college teachers.George B. Thomas Jr. acknowledged Tucker's contribution of many exercises to Thomas's classic textbook,Calculus and Analytic Geometry.[6]
In the early 1980s, Tucker recruited Princeton history professorCharles Coulston Gillispie to help him set up an oral history project to preserve stories about the Princeton mathematical community in the 1930s. With funding from theSloan Foundation, this project later expanded its scope. Among those who shared their memories of such figures asEinstein,von Neumann, andGödel were computer pioneerHerman Goldstine and Nobel laureatesJohn Bardeen andEugene Wigner.
Tucker's Ph.D. students includeMichel Balinski,David Gale,Alan J. Goldman,John Isbell,Stephen Maurer, Turing Award winnerMarvin Minsky, Nobel Prize winnerJohn Nash,Torrence Parsons, Nobel Prize winnerLloyd Shapley, Robert Singleton, andMarjorie Stein. Tucker advised and collaborated withHarold W. Kuhn on a number of papers and mathematical models.
Tucker noticed the leadership ability and talent of a young mathematics graduate student namedJohn G. Kemeny, whose hiring Tucker suggested toDartmouth College. Following Tucker's advice, Dartmouth recruited Kemeny, who became Chair of the Mathematics Department and later College President. Years later, Dartmouth College recognized Albert Tucker with an honorary degree.
Tucker died inHightstown, N.J. in 1995 at age 89. His sons,Alan Tucker andThomas W. Tucker, and his grandsonThomas J. Tucker are all also professional mathematicians.
At each (triennial) International Symposium of theMathematical Optimization Society (MOS) theTucker Prize, in honour of A. W. Tucker, is given for outstanding thesis in the area ofdiscrete mathematics.[7]
| Academic offices | ||
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| Preceded by | Dod Professor of Mathematics atPrinceton University 1954–1974 | Succeeded by |
