Albert W. Tucker

Albert William Tucker (28 November 1905 – 25 January 1995) was a Canadian mathematician who made important contributions in topology, game theory, and non-linear programming.

Biography

Albert Tucker was born in Oshawa, Ontario, Canada, and earned his B.A. at the University of Toronto in 1928 and his M.A. at the same institution in 1929. In 1932, he earned his Ph.D. at Princeton University under the supervision of Solomon Lefschetz, with a dissertation entitled ''An Abstract Approach to Manifolds''. In 1932–33 he was a National Research Fellow at Cambridge, Harvard, and then University of Chicago.

He then returned to Princeton to join the faculty in 1933, where he stayed until 1974. He chaired the mathematics department for about twenty years, one of the longest tenures. His extensive relationships within the field made him a great source for oral histories of the mathematics community.

His Ph.D. students include Michel Balinski, David Gale, Alan J. Goldman, John Isbell, Stephen Maurer, Turing Award winner Marvin Minsky, Nobel Prize winner John Forbes Nash, John Nash, Torrence Parsons, Nobel Prize winner Lloyd Shapley, Robert Singleton, and Marjorie Stein. Tucker advised and collaborated with Harold W. Kuhn on a number of papers and mathematical models.

In 1950, Albert Tucker gave the name and interpretation "prisoner's dilemma" to Merrill M. Flood and Melvin Dresher's model of cooperation and conflict, resulting in 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 education, as chair of the Advanced Placement Program, AP Calculus committee for the College Board (1960–1963), through work with the Committee on the Undergraduate Program in Mathematics (CUPM) of the Mathematical Association of America, MAA (he was president of the MAA in 1961–1962), and through many National Science Foundation, NSF summer workshops for high school and college teachers. George B. Thomas, George B. Thomas Jr. acknowledged Tucker's contribution of many exercises to Thomas's classic textbook, ''Calculus and Analytic Geometry.''

In the early 1980s, Tucker recruited Princeton history professor Charles Coulston Gillispie to help him set up an oral history project to preserve stories about the Princeton mathematical community in the 1930s. With funding from the Sloan Foundation, this project later expanded its scope. Among those who shared their memories of such figures as Albert Einstein, Einstein, John von Neumann, von Neumann, and Kurt Gödel, Gödel were computer pioneer Herman Goldstine and Nobel laureates John Bardeen and Eugene Wigner.

Albert Tucker noticed the leadership ability and talent of a young mathematics graduate student named John George Kemeny, John G. Kemeny, whose hiring Tucker suggested to Dartmouth College. Following Tucker's advice, Dartmouth recruited Kemeny, who became Chair of the Mathematics Department and later College President. Years later, Dartmouth College recognized Albert Tucker with an honorary degree. Tucker died in Hightstown, New Jersey, Hightstown, N.J. in 1995 at age 89. His sons, Alan Tucker and Thomas W. Tucker, and his grandson Thomas J. Tucker are all also professional mathematicians.

Works

* with Evar Nering: Linear Programs and related problems, Academic Press 1993
* with H. W. Kuhn (eds.): Contributions to the theory of games, Annals of Mathematical Studies 1950
* with H. W. Kuhn (eds.): Linear inequalities and related systems, Annals of Mathematical Studies 1956
* with Allan Gewirtz, Harry Sitomer: Constructive linear algebra, Englewood Cliffs 1974

Tucker Prize

At each (triennial) International Symposium of the Mathematical Optimization Society (MOS) the Tucker Prize, in honour of A. W. Tucker, is given for outstanding thesis in the area of discrete mathematics.

References

Further reading

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External links

News from PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
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Extract from an obituary

Kuhn-Tucker conditions


An oral history project initiated by Tucker, also contains a series of interviews with Tucker.

Oral History Interview with Albert W. Tucker
Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota.

Biography of Albert W. Tucker
from the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences

{{DEFAULTSORT:Tucker, Albert W.
1905 births
1995 deaths
20th-century Canadian mathematicians
Topologists
Game theorists
University of Toronto alumni
Harvard University staff
University of Chicago people
John von Neumann Theory Prize winners
People from Oshawa
Princeton University alumni
Princeton University faculty
Presidents of the Mathematical Association of America
Canadian emigrants to the United States
Oral history