Rufus Isaacs (game theorist)

Rufus Philip Isaacs (1914-1981) was a game theorist especially promenent in the 1950s and 1960s with his work on differential games. He worked for the RAND Corporation from 1948 until winter 1954/1955. His investigation stemmed from classic pursuit-evasion type zero sum dynamic two player games such as the Princess and monster game. In 1942, He married Rose Barcov, and they had two daughters.

His work in pure mathematics included working with monodiffric functions, fractional order mappings, graph theory, analytic functions, and number theory. In applied mathematics, he worked with aerodynamics, elasticity, optimization, and differential games, which he is most known for. He received his bachelors from MIT in 1936, and received his MA and PhD from Columbia University in 1942 and 1942 respectively. His first post after the war ended was at Notre Dame, but he left in 1947 due to salary issues. While at RAND, much of his work was classified, and thus remained unknown until the publication of his classic text on differential games a decade after leaving RAND. His career after RAND was spent largely in the defense and avionics industries. While at RAND, he worked with researchers including Richard E. Bellman, Leonard D. Berkovitz, David H. Blackwell, John M. Danskin, Melvin Dresher, Wendell H. Fleming, Irving L. Glicksberg, Oliver A. Gross, Samuel Karlin, John W. Milnor, John F. Nash, and Lloyd S. Shapley. His work has influenced such fundamental economic concepts as dynamic programming (Richard E. Bellman) and the Pontryagin maximum principle (Breitner 2005).

Major Work

Isaacs, Rufus. "Differential Games", John Wiley and Sons, 1965.

ee also

*Pursuit-evasion Games
*Princess and Monster game.

References

Yu, P.L. "An appreciation of professor Rufus Isaacs" Journal of Optimization Theory and Applications, Springer Netherlands. Volume 27, Number 1 / January, 1979

Breitner, M. H. "The Genesis of Differential Games in Light of Isaacs’ Contributions". Journal of Optimization Theory and Applications, Springer Netherlands. Volume 124, Number 3 / March, 2005