Harrison White - Early Years

Early Years

White was born on March 21, 1930 in Washington, D.C. At the age of 15, he entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), receiving his undergraduate degree at 20 years of age; five years later, in 1955, he received a doctorate in theoretical physics, also from MIT.

After receiving his PhD in theoretical physics, White started his doctoral studies in sociology at Princeton University. At the same time he took up a position as an operations analyst at the Operations Research Office, Johns Hopkins University. While continuing his studies at Princeton, White also spent a year as a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University, California. Upon an invitation from Herbert A. Simon, White then moved from California to Pittsburgh to work as an assistant professor at the Graduate School of Industrial Administration, Carnegie Institute of Technology (later Carnegie-Mellon University) where he stayed for a couple of years, between 1957 and 1959.

It was also during these years that White, still a graduate student in sociology, wrote and published his first social scientific work, "Sleep: A Sociological Interpretation" in Acta Sociologica, together with Vilhelm Aubert, a Norwegian sociologist. White carried out empirical research, which in May 1960 he submitted as his doctoral dissertation, earning a PhD in sociology from Princeton University.

It was also during these years that White met his first wife, Cynthia A. Johnson, who was a graduate of Radcliffe College, where she had majored in art history. The couple’s joint work on the French Impressionists, Canvases and Careers (1965) and “Institutional Changes in the French Painting World” (I964), originally grew out of a seminar on art in 1957 at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, led by Robert Wilson. In 1959, White moved to Chicago to start working as an associate professor at the Department of Sociology. At that time, both Peter Blau and Erving Goffman were there. During his stay at the University of Chicago, White finished An Anatomy of Kinship, published in 1963 within the Prentice-Hall series in Mathematical Analysis of Social Behavior, with James Coleman and James March as chief editors. The book received significant attention from many mathematical sociologists of the time, and contributed greatly to establish White as a model builder.