Merrill M. Flood

Merrill Meeks Flood was a mathematician, notable for developing, with Melvin Dresher, the the basis of the game theoretical Prisoner's dilemma model of cooperation and conflict while at RAND in 1950 (Albert W. Tucker gave the game it's prison-sentence interpretation, and thus the name by which it is known today). He obtained a Master's degree in number theory at the University of Nebraska, and a PhD at Princeton University in 1935 under the supervision of Joseph Wedderburn, for the dissertation Division by Non-singular Matric Polynomials.