Overview
John von Neumann
(1903—1957) Hungarian-born American mathematician and computer pioneer
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Abraham Wald
(1902–50; b. Cluj, Romania; d. Travancore, India)Hungarian geometer and statistician. Wald gained his PhD in geometry in 1931 from U Vienna. In 1938, on the Nazi seizure of Austria, he moved to ...
Alan Turing
(1912–1954)British mathematician, who introduced the concept of the Turing machine.Born in London, he was educated at King's College, Cambridge, where he was elected to a fellowship in 1936. In the ...
Arthur Walter Burks
(1915–)Arthur Burkswas born on 13 October 1915 in Duluth, Minnesota. From age ten through high school, he lived in Batavia, Illinois, west of Chicago, where his father commuted to ...
Atomic Scientists
From the moment when Albert Einstein in 1940 suggested to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, that a new and decisive military weapon, the atom bomb, might be developed from the phenomenon ...
bargaining theory
The branch of game theory that treats the rational strategies whereby agreements can be reached, for example on the price to be paid for a commodity.
Carl Gustav Hempel
(1905–97)Philosopher of science. Hempel was born in Orianenberg, Germany, and went to the United States in the 1930s. He taught from 1939 at New York, Yale, Princeton, and Pittsburgh. His work on the ...
computer
Any device capable of carrying out a sequence of operations in a defined manner. The definition of the operations is called the program. An analog computer performs computations by manipulating ...
computer science
The study of computers, their underlying principles and use. It comprises topics such as: programming; information structures; software engineering; programming languages; compilers and operating ...
Emil Leon Post
(1897–1954)Polish-born American mathematician and logician. Post introduced the truth-table method for defining and checking validity in propositional logic. His unpublished researches into problems ...
Émile Borel
(1871–1956)French mathematician and politician, well known for his work in probability theory.The son of a clergyman, Borel was born at St Affrique and educated at the École Normale Supérieure. After ...
Eugene Paul Wigner
(1902–1995)Hungarian-born US physicist, who was awarded the 1963 Nobel Prize for Physics for his introduction of the concept of parity into nuclear physics.The son of a Budapest businessman, Wigner ...
expected utility theory
A theory of decision making, formalized in 1947 by the Hungarian-born US mathematician John von Neumann (1903–57) and the German-born US economist Oskar Morgenstern (1902–77), according to which a ...
Fundamental Theorem of Game Theory
The following theorem, also known as the ‘Minimax Theorem’, due to Von Neumann:TheoremSuppose that, in a matrix game, E(x, y) is the expectation, where x and y are mixed strategies for the two ...
game theory
This concerns making rational decisions under uncertain conditions. In geography, game theory is often used to overcome or outwit the environment. A. Dinar et al. (2008) apply game theory to ...
George Armitage Miller
(1920–)George A. Miller was born on 3 February 1920 in Charleston, West Virginia. He received his BA in 1940 and a Masters in Speech Science in 1941, both from ...
interpersonal utility comparisons
Many theories of social welfare recognize that concepts of welfare or well-being (utility in economic terms) differ among persons and societies, but nonetheless require that comparisons between these ...
Jacob Marschak
(1898–1977)Marschak was born in Kiev, Russia on 23 July 1898. He died 27 July 1977 in Los Angeles, California. Marschak grew up in a liberal and cosmopolitan Jewish family ...
James McGill Buchanan
(1919– )James McGill Buchanan was born on 3 October 1919 in the country village of Gum, near Murfreesboro, in Rutherford County, Tennessee. He was raised on the Buchanan family farm ...
John Nash
(1928 –)Mathematician and economist best known for his contributions to game theory. Nash's interest in games developed at Princeton University, where the two founders of the field, John von ...
John Presper Eckert, Jr
(1919–1995)US electrical engineer, a pioneer in the development of the modern computer.Eckert was educated at the University of Pennsylvania, where in 1941 he joined the faculty. With the outbreak of ...
