Donald Bruce Gillies (October 151928 - July 171975) was a Canadian mathematician and computer scientist, known for his work in game theory, computer design, and minicomputer programming environments .
Education
Donald B. Gillies was born in Toronto Canada and attended the University of Toronto High School. Students at this Ontario school skipped a year ahead and so he finished his 13th-grade studies at the age of 18.
Gillies attended the Universtiy of Toronto (1946-1950), intending to major in Languages and started his first semester taking 7 different language courses. In his second semester he quickly switched back to majoring in Mathematics which was his love while in high school. In the Putnam exam competition of 1950, Gillies and his best friend John P. Mayberry outscored the faculty-designated mathematics team from the University of Toronto.
After one year of graduate school at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign(1951), Gillies transferred to Princeton University at the urging of John P. Mayberry to study under Jon von Neumann. His interest area was computer design first and mathematics second. During his time at Princeton he continued to work summers with U-Illinois researchers in the check-out of the ORDVAC Computer at Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland.
At one point during his graduate students, Von Neumann found out that Gillies had been spending time working on an Assembler (something that had not yet been invented.) Von Neumann became enraged and told Gillies to stop work immediately because computers would never be used to perform such menial tasks.
Gillies completed his PhD at the age of 25, in 1953, which was published in "Contributions to the theory of games" - in which he characterized the core which is the set of stable solutions in a non-zero sum game.
Early career
Gillies then went to England to work for the NRDC and worked with an early Pegasis computer there. This was done at a time when the U.S. government was drafting young people of all kinds - including canadians - into service in the Korean War. When Gillies returned to the USA he received a 1-A draft status which persisted until he was age 36. In 1956 Gillies married Alice E. Dunkle and began a job as a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
In early October of 1957 just hours after launch the UIUC Astronomy Department rigged an ad-hoc interferometer to measure signals from the Sputnik_I satellite. Gillies and Dr. Jim Snyder programmed the ILLIAC I computer to calculate the satellite orbit from this data in under two days. The subsequent report of the ephemeris (orbit) and later publication in the journal Nature helped to dispell some of the public panic created by the Sputnik launch by the Soviet Union.
Gillies wrote 3 patents in the last 1950's. One of them laid out all the details of how to implement a base register for relocation in computers - before it had been done. He considered these patents as kind of a joke, and assigned the rights of the patents to IBM, without taking fees for this service. This kept the ideas from being patented by others which would have hindered progress in the computer industy.
Starting in 1958 Gillies designed the pipeline control of the ILLIAC II super-computer at the University of Illinois. This work was in the public domain, and competed with the Stretch computer system design from IBM that is often credited with inventing pipelining. This work was presented in a 1962 michigan conference on computer design, "On the design of a very high speed computer" by Donald B. Gillies.
During check-out of the ILLIAC II computer, Donald B. Gillies found 3 new Mersenne primes, and published them in a paper, "3 new mersenne primes and a statistical theory." The checkout algorithm was designed to exercise every aspect of the ILLIAC II computer. Gillies also wanted to draw attention to this new computer design in the field of mathematics. His new Mersenne primes were reported in the Guinness book of World records.
Later career
In the late 1960's Gillies received a preprint of Wirth's "PASCAL User Manual and Report" and launched a project to build the first PASCAL compiler written in North America. Ian stocks was one of the graduate students who worked on this project, and the compiler (for the PDP-11 minicomputer) was completed in the early 1970's.
At the urging of graduate student Greg Chesson, Gillies became in 1974 the first licensee for the UNIX operating system from Bell Labs. Chesson went on to be the third person to edit the UNIX kernel and was the eighth hire at Silicon Graphics Incorporated.
Donald B. Gillies died at age 47 on July 17, 1975, of a rare viral myocarditis . His death was unexpected and a lecture series was established in his honor at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign.
In memorium
In 1994 the Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded to John Forbes Nash. In the Nash Lecture/Discussion, Gillies was mentioned as a pioneer in the field of game theory. Nash proved the existence of stable solutions for non-zero sum games; Gillies and Shapley extended this work by characterizing the core which is the set of stable solutions that cannot be improved by a coalition.
See Also
External Links
Last updated: 05-27-2005 15:12:37
Last updated: 10-29-2005 02:13:46
