Donald B. Gillies - in Memoriam

In Memoriam

Gillies died unexpectedly at age 46 on July 17, 1975, of a rare viral myocarditis. Digital Equipment Corporation and many of his friends, colleagues, and family contributed money for the Donald B. Gillies Memorial Lectureship In Computer Science, at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. This annual lectureship continues until this day.

In 1994, the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences was awarded to John Forbes Nash. In the Nash Seminar, Gillies (who was at Princeton at the same time as Nash) was mentioned as a pioneer in the field of game theory. Nash proved the existence of stable solutions for non-zero sum games; Gillies and Shapley extended this work by characterizing the core which is the set of stable solutions that cannot be improved by a coalition.

In 2006 the Donald B. Gillies Chair Professorship was established in the department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois. A generous donation from Lawrence (Larry) White, a former student, established this chair. The first professor to hold this chair is Lui Sha, a well-known authority on real-time and embedded systems.

In 2011, the UIUC Department of Computer Science awarded a Memorial Achievement Award to Gillies, and family members accepted the award on his behalf at the Urbana-Champaign campus.