Albert W. Tucker

Infobox_Scientist
name = Albert W. Tucker
image_width = 300px
caption = Albert William Tucker
birth_date = birth date|1905|11|28|df=y
birth_place = Ontario, Canada
death_date = death date and age|1995|1|25|1905|11|28|df=y
death_place = Highstown, N.J., U.S.
residence = U.S.
nationality = American, Canadian
field = Mathematician
work_institution = Princeton University
alma_mater = Princeton University
doctoral_advisor = Solomon Lefschetz
doctoral_students = David Gale
Marvin Minsky
John Forbes Nash
Torrence Parsons
Lloyd Shapley
known_for = Prisoner's dilemma
Karush-Kuhn-Tucker conditions
prizes =
religion =
footnotes =

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, John Isbell, Stephen Maurer, Marvin Minsky, Nobel Prize winner John Nash, Torrence Parsons, Lloyd Shapley, Robert Singleton, and Marjorie Stein. Although he wasn't his dissertation advisor, Tucker did advise and collaborated with Harold W. Kuhn on a number of papers and 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 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.

In the early 1980s, Tucker recruited Princeton history professor Charles Gillispie to help him set up an oral history project to preserve stories about the Princeton mathematical community in the 1930s. [http://infoshare1.princeton.edu/libraries/firestone/rbsc/finding_aids/mathoral/pm03.htm] With funding from the Sloan Foundation, this project later expanded its scope. Among those who shared their memories of such figures as Einstein, von Neumann, and Gödel [http://infoshare1.princeton.edu/libraries/firestone/rbsc/finding_aids/mathoral/pm05.htm] were computer pioneer Herman Goldstine and Nobel laureates John Bardeen and Eugene Wigner.

Albert Tucker received an honorary degree from Dartmouth College. He died in Highstown, N.J. in 1995 at age 89.

External links

* [http://www.princeton.edu/pr/news/95/q1/0126tucker.html News from PRINCETON UNIVERSITY]
*MathGenealogy|id=8581
* [http://www.lib.utexas.edu/taro/utcah/00301/cah-00301.html#a0 A Guide to Albert William Tucker Papers]
* [http://www.economics.utoronto.ca/osborne/MathTutorial/TUCKER.HTM Extract from an obituary]
* [http://www.economics.utoronto.ca/osborne/MathTutorial/KTCF.HTM Kuhn Tucker conditions]
* [http://infoshare1.princeton.edu/libraries/firestone/rbsc/finding_aids/mathoral/pm02.htm The Princeton Mathematics Community in the 1930s] Contains a series of interviews with Tucker.

Persondata
NAME= Tucker, Albert W.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES=
SHORT DESCRIPTION= American Mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH= 28 November 1905
PLACE OF BIRTH= Ontario, Canada
DATE OF DEATH= 25 January, 1995
PLACE OF DEATH= Highstown, N.J., U.S.