George W. Brown (academic)
| George W. Brown | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1917 |
| Died | June 20, 2005 (aged 87–88) |
| Institutions |
Princeton University RAND Corporation Iowa State University UCLA UC Irvine |
| Alma mater |
Princeton University Harvard University |
| Thesis | Reduction of a Certain Class of Composite Statistical Hypotheses[1] (1940) |
| Doctoral advisor | Samuel S. Wilks |
| Known for |
Fictitious play Brown-von-Neumann-Nash Dynamics |
George W. Brown (1917 – 20 June 2005) was an American statistician, game theorist, and computer scientist known for his work and research in early computing machinery, game theory, mathematical logic, decision theory and administration. He was a major force in the design and construction of early computing machinery, including the IAS machine, and subsequently directed the construction of JOHNNIAC. The concept of fictitious play in game theory is due to him.[2]
Biography
He received his Ph.D. at Princeton University in 1940 under advisor Samuel Wilks.[3] After graduation he was initially unable to get a job in academia due to the anti-semitism of the time, and his first job was in the research division of R. H. Macy & Co. (now Macy's Department Store) where he did statistical studies of the store's operations and met his first wife, Bobbie.[4] After the attack on Pearl Harbor, he returned to Princeton to work on military research projects and avoid the draft. In 1944 he moved to the RCA Labs, still in Princeton, and joined the group of Jan A. Rajchman where he helped design the Selectron tube, an early form of digital computer memory. During this time he also contributed to the IAS machine under John von Neumann with whom he would later collaborate on theoretical topics as well.
In 1946 he was finally granted a tenure-track professorial role at Iowa State University as an Associate Professor of Mathematics and Statistics, alongside his long time friend and colleague Alexander Mood. By 1947 he had been granted a full professorship but decided to leave for the RAND Corporation to become chief of their Numerical Analysis Department in 1948.[5] It was at RAND that he began the JOHNNIAC project,[6] named after John von Neumann, and based on the IAS machine and selectron tube memory. Due to his familiarity with the IAS machine and other early computers he worked as a consultant for IBM and other early computing companies. During this time he was also a Visiting Professor of Engineering and Mathematics at UCLA.
After a foray into early pay television with Telemeter (pay television),[7] he became the first director of the Western Data Processing Center at UCLA in 1957 and with that a professor in, and head of, the Dept. of Business Administration (later to become the School of Management). This shift to administration was due to IBM's offer to provide a free large-scale high-speed computer to UCLA, if they would employ Brown as the director of the computer laboratory. He was also attracted to this arrangement because of his disillusionment with the usual process by which universities acquired their first computers, saying "...look into how universities financed their participation with computers and you will discover that they sold their souls to Defense Department bookkeeping."[8] During this time he was also heavily involved in directing early computing industry startups including Dataproducts. In 1967 he moved to UC Irvine to become the dean of the Graduate School of Administration (now Paul Merage School of Business).[9] During this career transition from early computing technologies to administration, he worked on applying decision theory and game theoretic techniques to organizational structure and business administration. He stayed at Irvine until his retirement in 1982.
U.S. Patents
- U.S. Patent 2,519,172 Electron Discharge Control, 1950.
Notable Papers
- Brown, G.W. (1951) "Iterative Solutions of Games by Fictitious Play" In Activity Analysis of Production and Allocation, T.C. Koopmans (Ed.), New York: Wiley.
- G. Brown and J. von Neumann, "Solutions of Games by Differential Equations," in: H. Kuhn and A. Tucker (eds.) Contributions to the
Theory of Games, Annals of Mathematical Studies No. 24, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1950.
References
- ↑ George W. Brown at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
- ↑ Berger, U (2007). "Brown's original fictitious play". Journal of Economic Theory. 135: 572–578.
- ↑ George W. Brown at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
- ↑ Mood, Alexander. "In Memoriam". George W. Brown. University of California. Retrieved 27 November 2016.
- ↑ Ware, Willis H. (2008). RAND and the Information Evolution: A History in Essays and Vignettes. Rand Corporation. p. 28. ISBN 9786612451232.
- ↑ Uncapher, Keith. "Oral history interview with Keith Uncapher". Oral Histories of the Charles Babbage Institute. University of Minnesota. Retrieved 27 November 2016.
- ↑ Lappen, Chester Irwin. "Oral History interview with Chester Irwin Lappen". Oral Histories of the Charles Babbage Institute. University of Minnesota. Retrieved 27 November 2016.
- ↑ Mirowski, Philip (2002). Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science. Cambridge University Press. p. 352. ISBN 9780521772839.
- ↑ "Campus Appointments". University Bulletin. 16: 5. July 3, 1967. Retrieved 27 November 2016.