Albert W. Tucker
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Albert William Tucker (28 November 1905 – 25 January, 1995) was a Canadian-born American mathematician, who made important contributions in topology, game theory and non-linear programming.
Albert Tucker was born in Ontario, Canada, and earned his B.A. at the University of Toronto in 1928. In 1932, he completed his Ph.D. at the Princeton University under the supervision of Solomon Lefschetz, with the thesis An Abstract Approach to Manifolds.
In 1932–33 he was a National Research Fellow at Cambridge, Harvard, and the University of Chicago. He then returned to Princeton to join the faculty in 1933, where he stayed till 1970. He chaired the mathematics department for about twenty years. Almost no one else was there for such a long time. Tucker also knew everyone and remembered everything making him a great source for oral histories of the mathematics community.
His Ph.D. students include Michel Balinski, David Gale, Alan Goldman, Stephen Maurer, Marvin Minsky, Nobel Prize winner John Nash, and Torrence Parsons.
In 1950, Albert Tucker concocted the prisoner's dilemma, the most well-known game theoretic paradox. He is also well known for the Karush-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 educations, as chair of the AP Calculus committee for the College Board (1960–1963), through work with the Committee on the Undergraduate Program in Mathematics (CUPM) of the MAA (he was president of the MAA in 1961–1962), and through many NSF summer workshops for high school and college teachers.
Albert Tucker received a honorary degree from Dartmouth College. He died in Highstown, N.J. in 1995 at age 89.
External links
- [News from PRINCETON UNIVERSITY]
- [Mathematics Genealogy Project]
- [A Guide to Albert William Tucker Papers]
- [Extract from an obituary]
- [Kuhn Tucker conditions]
- [The Princeton Mathematics Community in the 1930s] Contains a series of interviews with Tucker.
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