Donald B. Gillies - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Donald Bruce Gillies was a Canadian mathematician and computer scientist, known for his work in game theory

Game theory

Game theory is a mathematical method for analyzing calculated circumstances, such as in games, where a person’s success is based upon the choices of others...

, computer design, and minicomputer

Minicomputer

A minicomputer is a class of multi-user computers that lies in the middle range of the computing spectrum, in between the largest multi-user systems and the smallest single-user systems...

programming environments.

Education

Donald B. Gillies was born in Toronto

Toronto

Toronto is the provincial capital of Ontario and the largest city in Canada. It is located in Southern Ontario on the northwestern shore of Lake Ontario. A relatively modern city, Toronto's history dates back to the late-18th century, when its land was first purchased by the British monarchy from...

, Canada

Canada

Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...

and attended the University of Toronto Schools

University of Toronto Schools

The University of Toronto Schools is an independent secondary day school affiliated with the University of Toronto in Toronto, Ontario, Canada...

, a laboratory school originally affiliated with the University. 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 University of Toronto

University of Toronto

The University of Toronto is a public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, situated on the grounds that surround Queen's Park. It was founded by royal charter in 1827 as King's College, the first institution of higher learning in Upper Canada...

(1946–1950), intending to major in Languages and started his first semester taking seven 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 placed in the top 10 in North America, following his University of Toronto classmates John P. Mayberry and Richard J. Semple who were top 5 Putnam Fellows. Toronto would likely have won the competition in 1950 had Gillies been on the faculty-designated team.)

After one year of graduate school at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

The University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign is a large public research-intensive university in the state of Illinois, United States. It is the flagship campus of the University of Illinois system...

(1951), Gillies transferred to Princeton University

Princeton University

Princeton University is a private research university located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. The school is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League, and is one of the nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution....

at the urging of John P. Mayberry to study under John von Neumann

John von Neumann

John von Neumann was a Hungarian-American mathematician and polymath who made major contributions to a vast number of fields, including set theory, functional analysis, quantum mechanics, ergodic theory, geometry, fluid dynamics, economics and game theory, computer science, numerical analysis,...

. Gillies and Mayberry were arch-rivals and best friends, and after Mayberry beat Gillies in the Putnam exam, each competed to finish their PhD degree first. At Princeton Gillies met his future wife, Alice E. Dunkle. When their relationship fizzled, knowing of the rivalry, she flirted with Mayberry, who subsequently approached Gillies to ask if he was still dating her. This tactic, used only once, led to their eventual marriage.

During his time at Princeton his interest area was computer design first and mathematics second. He continued to work summers with U-Illinois researchers in the check-out of the ORDVAC

ORDVAC

The ORDVAC or Ordnance Discrete Variable Automatic Computer, an early computer built by the University of Illinois for the Ballistics Research Laboratory at Aberdeen Proving Ground, was based on the IAS architecture developed by John von Neumann, which came to be known as the von Neumann architecture...

Computer at Aberdeen Proving Ground

Aberdeen Proving Ground

Aberdeen Proving Ground is a United States Army facility located near Aberdeen, Maryland, . Part of the facility is a census-designated place , which had a population of 3,116 at the 2000 census.- History :...

in Maryland.

At one point during his graduate studies, 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.

After only two years of study at Princeton, Gillies completed his PhD before Mayberry, at age 25, in 1953, which was published in "Contributions to the theory of games" — in which he characterized the core

Core (economics)

The core is the set of feasible allocations that cannot be improved upon by a subset of the economy's consumers. A coalition is said to improve upon or block a feasible allocation if the members of that coalition are better off under another feasible allocation that is identical to the first...

which is the set of stable solutions in a non-zero sum game.

Early career

Gillies then went to England for two years to work for the NRDC (National Research Development Corporation) and worked with an early Pegasus 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 in 1956 he received a 1-A draft status which persisted until he was age 36. Upon returning to the USA, Gillies married Alice E. Dunkle and began a job as a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

In early October 1957 just hours after launch of Sputnik I, the UIUC Astronomy Department rigged an ad-hoc interferometer to measure signals from the satellite. The launch — by the Russian Military — caused a widespread panic across the United States. Gillies and Dr Jim Snyder programmed the ILLIAC I

ILLIAC I

The ILLIAC I , a pioneering computer built in 1952 by the University of Illinois, was the first computer built and owned entirely by a US educational institution, Manchester University UK having built Manchester Mark 1 in 1948.ILLIAC I was based on the Institute for Advanced Study Von Neumann...

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
Nature (journal)
Nature, first published on 4 November 1869, is ranked the world's most cited interdisciplinary scientific journal by the Science Edition of the 2010 Journal Citation Reports...

helped to dispel some of the fear created by the Sputnik launch by the Soviet Union. It also lent credance to the (likely false) idea that the Sputnik launch was part of an organized effort to dominate space.

Gillies wrote 3 patents in the late 1950s. 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 industry.

Starting in 1958, Gillies designed the 3-stage pipeline control of the ILLIAC II

ILLIAC II

The ILLIAC II was a revolutionary super-computer built by the University of Illinois that became operational in 1962.-Description:The concept, proposed in 1958, pioneered Emitter-coupled logic circuitry, pipelining, and transistor memory with a design goal of 100x speedup compared to ILLIAC...

supercomputer at the University of Illinois. The control circuitry consisted of advanced control, delayed control, and interplay. This work was in the public domain, and competed with the Stretch

IBM 7030

The IBM 7030, also known as Stretch, was IBM's first transistorized supercomputer. The first one was delivered to Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1961....

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 Gillies.
During check-out of the ILLIAC II

ILLIAC II

computer, Gillies found 3 new Mersenne primes, and published them in a paper, "Three 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, and the largest one was immortalized on all mail sent from the Postal Annex at the Math department of the University of Illinois.

Later career

In the late 1960s, Gillies became concerned that students were not getting direct access to computers any more. He lobbied UIUC to adopt the 1968 WATFOR

WATFIV programming language

WATFIV, or WATerloo FORTRAN IV, developed at the University of Waterloo, Canada is an implementation of the Fortran computer programming language. It is the successor of WATFOR.WATFIV was used from the late 1960s into the mid 1970s...

one-pass FORTRAN compiler / runtime system from the University of Waterloo

University of Waterloo

The University of Waterloo is a comprehensive public university in the city of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. The school was founded in 1957 by Drs. Gerry Hagey and Ira G. Needles, and has since grown to an institution of more than 30,000 students, faculty, and staff...

in Ontario. This was a fast-turnaround IDE

Integrated development environment

An integrated development environment is a software application that provides comprehensive facilities to computer programmers for software development...

for batch-based mainframe computers. At the time it was common practice to submit a job (card deck) and pick up the results the next day. The WATFOR compiler could compile, link, and run a short program in the compiler's memory space in a few seconds. This compiler allowed the university to offer underclass programming courses not only to computer scientists but also to business majors and to other non-specialists.

In 1969, Gillies received a preprint of Wirth

Niklaus Wirth

Niklaus Emil Wirth is a Swiss computer scientist, best known for designing several programming languages, including Pascal, and for pioneering several classic topics in software engineering. In 1984 he won the Turing Award for developing a sequence of innovative computer languages.-Biography: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 fast-turnaround 2-pass compiler, and the compiler (for the Digital Equipment PDP-11

PDP-11

The PDP-11 was a series of 16-bit minicomputers sold by Digital Equipment Corporation from 1970 into the 1990s, one of a succession of products in the PDP series. The PDP-11 replaced the PDP-8 in many real-time applications, although both product lines lived in parallel for more than 10 years...

minicomputer) was completed in the early 1970s. This work was part of the "PDP-11 Playpen" project which focused on getting graduate students direct access to low-cost computer hardware, such as the PDP-11/23, where the Pascal compiler ran.

Two years later at the urging of his graduate student, Greg Chesson, Gillies became in 1974 the first licensee for the UNIX

Unix

Unix is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna...

operating system

Operating system

An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...

from Bell Labs

Bell Labs

Bell Laboratories is the research and development subsidiary of the French-owned Alcatel-Lucent and previously of the American Telephone & Telegraph Company , half-owned through its Western Electric manufacturing subsidiary.Bell Laboratories operates its...

. Chesson went on to be the third person to edit the Unix kernel and was the eighth hire at Silicon Graphics Inc..

In memoriam

Gillies died unexpectedly at age 46 on July 17, 1975, of a rare viral myocarditis

Myocarditis

Myocarditis is inflammation of heart muscle . It resembles a heart attack but coronary arteries are not blocked.Myocarditis is most often due to infection by common viruses, such as parvovirus B19, less commonly non-viral pathogens such as Borrelia burgdorferi or Trypanosoma cruzi, or as a...

. Digital Equipment Corporation and many of his friends, colleagues, and family contributed money for the Donald B. Gillies Memorial Lectureship In Computer Science, at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. This annual lectureship continues until this day.

In 1994, the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences

Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences

The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, commonly referred to as the Nobel Prize in Economics, but officially the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel , is an award for outstanding contributions to the field of economics, generally regarded as one of the...

was awarded to John Forbes Nash

John Forbes Nash

John Forbes Nash, Jr. is an American mathematician whose works in game theory, differential geometry, and partial differential equations have provided insight into the forces that govern chance and events inside complex systems in daily life...

. In the Nash Seminar, Gillies (who was at Princeton at the same time as Nash) 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.

In 2006 the Donald B. Gillies Chair Professorship was established in the department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois. A generous donation from Lawrence (Larry) White, a former student, established this chair. The first professor to hold this chair is Lui Sha, a well-known authority on real-time and embedded systems.

Students

Greg Chesson
Ian Stocks
Al Davis
Many others, some in the UIUC Mathematics Department.

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.