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Donald Bruce Gillies (October 15, 1928 - July 17, 1975) was a Canadian mathematician and computer scientist, known for his work in game theory, computer design, and minicomputer programming environments. October 15 is the 288th day of the year (289th in leap years). ...
1928 (MCMXXVIII) was a leap year starting on Sunday (link will take you to calendar). ...
July 17 is the 198th day (199th in leap years) of the year in the Gregorian calendar, with 167 days remaining. ...
1975 (MCMLXXV) was a common year starting on Wednesday. ...
Game theory is a branch of applied mathematics and economics that studies situations where players choose different actions in an attempt to maximize their returns. ...
Minicomputer (colloquially, mini) is a largely obsolete term for a class of multi-user computers which make up the middle range of the computing spectrum, in between the largest multi-user systems (traditionally, mainframe computers) and the smallest single-user systems (microcomputers or personal computers). ...
 Donald B. Gillies in 1974 (Courtesy UIUC Dept. of Computer Science). Image File history File links Donald B. Gillies circa 1974. ...
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. UTS on Bloor Street (the entrance is undergoing construction work by film crews in preparation for filming for Take the Lead, starring Antonio Banderas) The University of Toronto Schools (UTS) (1910-) is an independent secondary school in downtown Toronto, Canada. ...
Gillies attended the University of Toronto (1946-1950), intending to major in Languages and started his first semester taking 7 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 and his best friend John P. Mayberry outscored the faculty-designated mathematics team from the University of Toronto. The University of Toronto (U of T) is a coeducational public research university in Toronto, Ontario. ...
1946 (MCMXLVI) was a common year starting on Tuesday. ...
1950 (MCML) was a common year starting on Sunday (link will take you to calendar). ...
The William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition, often abbreviated to Putnam Competition, is an annual mathematics competition for undergraduate college students, awarding scholarships and cash prizes ranging from $2,500 to $250 for the top 25 students and $25,000 to $5,000 for the top five schools. ...
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. His interest area was computer design first and mathematics second. During his time at Princeton he continued to work summers with U-Illinois researchers in the check-out of the ORDVAC Computer at Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, also known as UIUC and the U of I (the officially preferred abbreviation), is the flagship campus in the University of Illinois system. ...
Princeton University is a coeducational private university located in Princeton, New Jersey in the United States of America. ...
John von Neumann in the 1940s. ...
The ORDVAC or Ordnance Discrete Variable Automatic Computer, an early computer built by the University of Illinois for the Ballistic Research Laboratory at Aberdeen Proving Ground, was based on the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) architecture developed by John von Neumann. ...
Aberdeen Proving Ground is a United States Army proving ground located in Harford County, Maryland at Aberdeen, 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, 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.
Early career Gillies then went to England to work for the NRDC (National Research Development Corporation) and worked with an early Pegasus computer there. This was done at a time when the U.S. government was drafting young people of all kinds - including Canadians - into service in the Korean War. When Gillies returned to the USA in 1956 he received a 1-A draft status which persisted until he was age 36. Upon returning to the USA, Gillies married Alice E. Dunkle and began a job as a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
In early October of 1957 just hours after launch of Sputnik I, the UIUC Astronomy Department rigged an ad-hoc interferometer to measure signals from the satellite. The launch - by the Russian Military - caused a widespread panic across the United States. Gillies and Dr. Jim Snyder programmed the ILLIAC I computer to calculate the satellite orbit from this data in under two days. The subsequent report of the ephemeris (orbit) and later publication in the journal Nature helped to dispel some of the fear created by the Sputnik launch by the Soviet Union. Sputnik 1 was the first artificial satellite to be launched into orbit, on October 4, 1957. ...
The ILLIAC I (Illinois Automatic Computer), a pioneering computer built in 1952 by the University of Illinois, was the first computer built and owned entirely by an educational institution. ...
Gillies wrote 3 patents in the last 1950's. One of them laid out all the details of how to implement a base register for relocation in computers - before it had been done. He considered these patents as kind of a joke, and assigned the rights of the patents to IBM, without taking fees for this service. This kept the ideas from being patented by others which would have hindered progress in the computer industry.
Starting in 1958 Gillies designed the 3-stage pipeline control of the ILLIAC II super-computer at the University of Illinois. The control circuitry consisted of advanced control, delayed control, and interplay. This work was in the public domain, and competed with the Stretch computer system design from IBM that is often credited with inventing pipelining. This work was presented in a 1962 Michigan conference on computer design, "On the design of a very high speed computer" by Donald B. Gillies. The ILLIAC II was a computer built by the University of Illinois and became operational in 1962. ...
The IBM 7030, also known as Stretch, was IBMs first attempt at building a supercomputer. ...
 The Math Dept. at UIUC celebrated the new primes with a postal meter cancellation stamp - until Appel and Haken proved the 4-color theorem in 1976. During check-out of the ILLIAC II computer, Donald B. Gillies found 3 new Mersenne primes, and published them in a paper, "Three new Mersenne primes and a statistical theory." The checkout algorithm was designed to exercise every aspect of the ILLIAC II computer. Gillies also wanted to draw attention to this new computer design in the field of mathematics. His new Mersenne primes were reported in the Guinness book of World records, and the largest one was immortalized on all mail sent from the Postal Annex at the Math department of The University of Illinois. Image File history File links Donald B. Gillies discovered 3 new mersenne primes in early 1963. ...
Kenneth Appel is a mathematician who, in 1976 with colleague Wolfgang Haken at the University of Illinois in Urbana, solved one of the most famous problems in mathematics, the four-color theorem. ...
Wolfgang Haken (born June 21, 1928) is a mathematician who specialized in topology, in particular 3-manifolds. ...
Example of a four color map Example of a map with non-contiguous regions The four color theorem (also known as the four color map theorem) states that given any plane separated into regions, such as a political map of the counties of a state, the regions may be colored...
The ILLIAC II was a computer built by the University of Illinois and became operational in 1962. ...
In mathematics, a Mersenne prime is a prime number that is one less than a power of two. ...
Later career In the late 1960's Gillies became concerned that students were not getting direct access to computers any more. He lobbied UIUC to adopt the 1968 WATFIV one-pass FORTRAN compiler / runtime system from the University of Waterloo in Ontario. This was a fast-turnaround IDE for batch-based mainframe computers. At the time it was common practice to submit a job (card deck) and pick up the results the next day. The WATFIV compiler could compile, link, and run a short program in the compiler's memory space in a few seconds. This compiler allowed the university to offer underclass programming courses not only to computer scientists but also to business majors and to non-specialists. WATFIV, or WATerloo FORTRAN IV, is an implementation of Fortran IV developed at the University of Waterloo, Canada. ...
The University of Waterloo, also known as UW, UWaterloo, or simply, Waterloo is a medium-sized research-intensive public university in the city of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. ...
An integrated development environment (IDE), also known as integrated design environment and integrated debugging environment, is a type of computer software that assists computer programmers in developing software. ...
In 1969 Gillies received a preprint of Wirth's "Pascal User Manual and Report" and launched a project to build the first Pascal compiler written in North America. Ian Stocks was one of the graduate students who worked on this fast-turnaround 2-pass compiler, and the compiler (for the Digital Equipment PDP-11 minicomputer) was completed in the early 1970's. This work was part of the "PDP-11 Playpen" project which focused on getting graduate students direct access to low-cost computer hardware, such as the PDP-11/23, where the Pascal compiler ran. Niklaus Wirth giving a lecture Niklaus E. Wirth (born February 15, 1934) is a Swiss computer scientist. ...
Pascal is an imperative computer programming language, developed in 1970 by Niklaus Wirth as a language particularly suitable for structured programming. ...
The PDP-11 was a 16-bit minicomputer sold by Digital Equipment Corp. ...
Two years later at the urging of his graduate student, Greg Chesson, Gillies became in 1974 the first licensee for the UNIX operating system from Bell Labs. Chesson went on to be the third person to edit the Unix kernel and was the eighth hire at Silicon Graphics Inc.. Unix or UNIX is a computer operating system originally developed in the 1960s and 1970s by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and Douglas McIlroy. ...
To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ...
Bell Laboratories (also known as Bell Labs and formerly known as AT&T Bell Laboratories and Bell Telephone Laboratories) was the main research and development arm of the United States Bell System. ...
This article needs to be cleaned up to conform to a higher standard of quality. ...
Donald B. Gillies died at age 46 on July 17, 1975, of a rare viral myocarditis. His death was unexpected and donations, including a large donation from the Digital Equipment Corporation, allowed a lecture series to be established in his honor at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. In medicine (cardiology), myocarditis is inflammation of the myocardium, the muscular part of the heart. ...
In memoriam In 1994 the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences was awarded to John Forbes Nash. In the Nash Lecture/Discussion, Gillies 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. The Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel (in Swedish Sveriges Riksbanks pris i ekonomisk vetenskap till Alfred Nobels minne), is a prize awarded each year for outstanding intellectual contributions in the field of economics. ...
John Forbes Nash, Jr. ...
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.
See also The ORDVAC or Ordnance Discrete Variable Automatic Computer, an early computer built by the University of Illinois for the Ballistic Research Laboratory at Aberdeen Proving Ground, was based on the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) architecture developed by John von Neumann. ...
The ILLIAC I (Illinois Automatic Computer), a pioneering computer built in 1952 by the University of Illinois, was the first computer built and owned entirely by an educational institution. ...
The ILLIAC II was a computer built by the University of Illinois and became operational in 1962. ...
Pascal is an imperative computer programming language, developed in 1970 by Niklaus Wirth as a language particularly suitable for structured programming. ...
Unix or UNIX is a computer operating system originally developed in the 1960s and 1970s by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and Douglas McIlroy. ...
The PDP-11 was a 16-bit minicomputer sold by Digital Equipment Corp. ...
In mathematics, a Mersenne prime is a prime number that is one less than a prime power of two. ...
External links - University of Illinois Computing Timeline
- Mersenne Primes History, Theorems and Lists
- Donald B. Gillies chair professorship at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
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