Donald B. Gillies | |
|---|---|
| Born | Donald Bruce Gillies (1928-10-15)October 15, 1928 Toronto, Ontario, Canada |
| Died | July 17, 1975(1975-07-17) (aged 46) Urbana, Illinois, US |
| Alma mater | University of Toronto University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Princeton University |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Mathematics,Computer Science |
| Institutions | University of Illinois, Stanford University (sabbatical), National Research Development Corporation (UK) |
| Doctoral advisor | John von Neumann |
Donald Bruce Gillies (October 15, 1928 – July 17, 1975) was aCanadian computer scientist and mathematician who worked in the fields of computer design,game theory, andminicomputerprogramming environments.
Donald B. Gillies was born inToronto, Ontario, Canada, to John Zachariah Gillies (a Canadian) and Anne Isabelle Douglas MacQueen (an American). He attended theUniversity of Toronto Schools, a laboratory school originally affiliated with the university. Gillies completed his undergraduate degree at theUniversity of Toronto.[1]
He began his graduate education at theUniversity of Illinois and helped with the checkout ofORDVAC computer in the summer of 1951. After one year he transferred to Princeton to work forJohn von Neumann and developed the first theorems ofcore (game theory) in hisPhD thesis.[2]
Gillies ranked among the top ten participants in theWilliam Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition held in 1950.[3]
Gillies moved to England for two years to work for theNational Research Development Corporation. He returned to the US in 1956, married Alice E. Dunkle,[4] and began a job as a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Starting in 1957, Gillies designed the three-stage pipeline control of theILLIAC II supercomputer at the University of Illinois.[6] The pipelined stages were named "advanced control", "delayed control", and "interplay". This work competed with theIBM 7030 Stretch computer and was in the public domain. Gillies presented a talk on ILLIAC II at theUniversity of Michigan Engineering Summer Conference in 1962.[7] During checkout of ILLIAC II, Gillies found three newMersenne primes,[8] one of which was the largest prime number known at the time.[9]
In 1969, Gillies launched a project to build the first Pascal compiler written in North America, a fast-turnaround, in-memory, 2-pass compiler. The compiler, for the PDP-11/23 minicomputer, was completed before 1975.[10][11]
In 1974, Gillies became the firstsource code[12] licensee for the Bell Labs UNIX operating system.[13]
Gillies died unexpectedly at age 46 on July 17, 1975, of a rare viral infection.[14]
In 1975, the Donald B. Gillies Memorial lecture was established at the University of Illinois, with one leading researcher from computer science appearing every year. The first lecturer wasAlan Perlis.[15]
In 2006, the Donald B. Gillies Chair Professorship was established in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois.Vikram Adve was invested as the second chair professor of the endowment in 2018.[16] The Department of Computer Science awarded a Memorial Achievement Award to Gillies in 2011.[17]
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