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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. 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. 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
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. 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. 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. 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. See also | ||||||||||||
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