Donald B. Gillies

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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.

Donald B. Gillies in 1974 (Courtesy UIUC Dept. of Computer Science).
Donald B. Gillies in 1974 (Courtesy UIUC Dept. of Computer Science).

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[edit] 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 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.

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 threw herself at Mayberry who approached Gillies to ask if he was still dating her[1]. 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.

[edit] Early career

Gillies then went to England for two years 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[2] helped to dispel some of the fear created by the Sputnik launch by the Soviet Union. It also lent credance to the (likely false) idea that the Sputnik Launch was part of an organized effort to dominate space[3].

Gillies wrote 3 patents in the late 1950s. 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 supercomputer 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 Math Department at UIUC celebrated the new primes with a postal meter cancellation stamp — until Appel and Haken proved the 4-color theorem in 1976.
The Math Department 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.

[edit] Later career

In the late 1960s, Gillies became concerned that students were not getting direct access to computers any more. He lobbied UIUC to adopt the 1968 WATFOR 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 WATFOR 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 other non-specialists.

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 1970s. 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.

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..

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.

[edit] 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.

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.

[edit] See also


[edit] References

  1. ^ Alice E. D. Gillies, personal communication
  2. ^ I. R. King, G. C. McVittie, G. W. Swenson, Jr., and S. P. Wyatt, Jr., "Further observations of the first satellite," Nature, No. 4593, November 9, 1957, p. 943.
  3. ^ Vladimir Isachenov (AP), Secrets of Sputnik Launch Revealed, October 1, 2007.


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