Donald B. Gillies - Education

Education

Donald B. Gillies was born in Toronto, Canada and attended the University of Toronto Schools, a laboratory school originally affiliated with the University. Students at this Ontario school skipped a year ahead and so he finished his 13th-grade studies at the age of 18.

Gillies attended the University of Toronto (1946–1950), intending to major in Languages and started his first semester taking seven different language courses. In his second semester he quickly switched back to majoring in Mathematics which was his love while in high school. In the Putnam exam competition of 1950, Gillies placed in the top 10 in North America, following his University of Toronto classmates John P. Mayberry and Richard J. Semple who were top 5 Putnam Fellows. Toronto would likely have won the competition in 1950 had Gillies been on the faculty-designated team.

After one year of graduate school at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (1951), Gillies transferred to Princeton University at the urging of John P. Mayberry to study under John von Neumann. Gillies and Mayberry were arch-rivals and best friends, and after Mayberry beat Gillies in the Putnam exam, each competed to finish their PhD degree first. At Princeton Gillies met his future wife, Alice E. Dunkle. When their relationship fizzled, knowing of the rivalry, she flirted with Mayberry, who subsequently approached Gillies to ask if he was still dating her. This tactic, used only once, led to their eventual marriage.

During his time at Princeton his interest area was computer design first and mathematics second. He continued to work summers with U-Illinois researchers in the check-out of the ORDVAC Computer at Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland.

At one point during his graduate studies, Von Neumann found out that Gillies had been spending time working on an Assembler (something that had not yet been invented). Von Neumann became enraged and told Gillies to stop work immediately because computers would never be used to perform such menial tasks.

After only two years of study at Princeton, Gillies completed his PhD before Mayberry, at age 25, in 1953, which was published in "Contributions to the theory of games" — in which he characterized the core which is the set of stable solutions in a non-zero sum game.