Donald Bruce Gillies (October 15, 1928 – July 17, 1975) was a

Canadian Canadians (french: Canadiens) are people identified with the country of Canada. This connection may be residential, legal, historical or cultural. For most Canadians, many (or all) of these connections exist and are collectively the source of ...

computer scientist and mathematician who worked in the fields of computer design, game theory, and minicomputer

programming environment An integrated development environment (IDE) is a software application that provides comprehensive facilities to computer programmers for software development. An IDE normally consists of at least a source code editor, build automation tools a ...

Early life and education

Donald B. Gillies was born in

Toronto, Ontario Toronto ( ; or ) is the capital city of the Canadian province of Ontario. With a recorded population of 2,794,356 in 2021, it is the most populous city in Canada and the fourth most populous city in North America. The city is the ancho ...

, Canada, to John Zachariah Gillies (a Canadian) and Anne Isabelle Douglas MacQueen (an American). He attended the

University of Toronto Schools University of Toronto Schools (UTS) is an independent secondary day school affiliated with the University of Toronto in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The school follows a specialized academic curriculum, and admission is determined by competitive ex ...

, a laboratory school originally affiliated with the University. Gillies attended the

University of Toronto The University of Toronto (UToronto or U of T) is a public university, public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, located on the grounds that surround Queen's Park (Toronto), Queen's Park. It was founded by royal charter in 1827 ...

from 1946 to 1950, majoring in Mathematics. He began his college education at the University of Illinois and helped with the checkout of

Illiac I The ILLIAC I (Illinois Automatic Computer), a pioneering computer in the ILLIAC series of computers built in 1952 by the University of Illinois, was the first computer built and owned entirely by a United States educational institution. Compute ...

computer in the summer of 1951. He then transferred to Princeton to work for

John von Neumann John von Neumann (; hu, Neumann János Lajos, ; December 28, 1903 – February 8, 1957) was a Hungarian-American mathematician, physicist, computer scientist, engineer and polymath. He was regarded as having perhaps the widest cove ...

and developed the first theorems of

core (game theory) In cooperative game theory, the core is the set of feasible allocations that cannot be improved upon by a subset (a ''coalition'') of the economy's agents. A coalition is said to ''improve upon'' or ''block'' a feasible allocation if the members ...

in his PhD thesis. Gillies ranked among the top ten participants in the

William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition The William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition, often abbreviated to Putnam Competition, is an annual mathematics competition for undergraduate college students enrolled at institutions of higher learning in the United States and Canada (regar ...

held in 1950.

Career

Gillies moved to England for two years to work for the

National Research Development Corporation The National Research Development Corporation (NRDC) was a non-departmental government body established by the British Government to transfer technology from the public sector to the private sector. History The NRDC was established by Attlee's Lab ...

. He returned to the US in 1956, married Alice E. Dunkle, and began a job as a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. MersennePrimeStamp

Gillies found three new

Mersenne prime In mathematics, a Mersenne prime is a prime number that is one less than a power of two. That is, it is a prime number of the form for some integer . They are named after Marin Mersenne, a French Minim friar, who studied them in the early 17th ...

s, one of which was the largest prime number known at the time.

Death and legacy

Gillies died unexpectedly at age 46 on July 17, 1975, of a rare viral myocarditis. In 1975, the Donald B. Gillies Memorial lecture was established at the University of Illinois, with one leading researcher from computer science appearing every year. The first lecturer was

Alan Perlis Alan Jay Perlis (April 1, 1922 – February 7, 1990) was an American computer scientist and professor at Purdue University, Carnegie Mellon University and Yale University. He is best known for his pioneering work in programming languages and was t ...

. In 2006, the Donald B. Gillies Chair Professorship was established in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois.

Vikram Adve Vikram Adve (born 28 June 1966) is the Donald B. Gillies professor in the Department of Computer Science and a Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Academia In 2020, Vikram Adve is ...

was invested as the second chair professor of the endowment in 2018. The Department of Computer Science awarded a Memorial Achievement Award to Gillies in 2011. Memorial Achievement Award

References

External links

*
Donald B. Gillies Memorial Lecture (UIUC CS Dept.)University of Illinois Computing TimelineAt the dawn of the space age (UIUC Astronomy Dept.)
* ttp://www.utm.edu/research/primes/mersenne/ Mersenne Primes History, Theorems and Listsbr>Donald B. Gillies chair professorship at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
* ttps://www.jstor.org/stable/2003409 Donald B. Gillies, Three New Mersenne Primes and a Statistical Theory, Mathematics of Comput., Vol. 18:85 (Jan. 1964), pp. 93-97.br> Ian Stocks and Jayant Krishnaswamy, On a transportable high level language for minicomputers, ACM SIGMINI/SIGPLAN Conference, March 1976On a transportable high level language for minicomputers
{{DEFAULTSORT:Gillies, Donald B. 1928 births 1975 deaths Canadian computer scientists Computer designers Game theorists Scientists from Toronto Princeton University alumni University of Toronto alumni University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign alumni University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign faculty 20th-century Canadian mathematicians

Early life and education

Career

Death and legacy

See also

References

External links