William C. Davidon

William Cooper Davidon ( born March 18, 1927 in Fort Lauderdale, Florida; † November 8, 2013 ) was an American physicist and mathematician who was concerned with theoretical physics and numerical analysis. He was also a civil rights activist.

Davidon studied at the University of Chicago with a bachelor 's degree in 1947, her Master's degree in 1950 and his doctorate in 1954 ( A proper time formalism ). 1943/44, he was an electronic engineer at the Mines Equipment Corporation from 1948 to 1954 and Director of Research at the Nuclear Instrumentation and Chemical Corporation. From 1954 to 1956 he worked at the Enrico Fermi Institute at the University of Chicago and from 1956 to 1961 at the Argonne National Laboratory, before 1969, he was Associate Professor and later Professor of Physics at Haverford College. In 1981, he moved to a professorship of mathematics. In 1991 he became Professor Emeritus.

1966/67, he was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Aarhus and 1976/77 at the University of Trondheim. He was involved in the development of the first quasi -Newton method, the Davidon - Fletcher -Powell algorithm). (named also after Roger Fletcher and Michael JD Powell, who further developed the method in 1963.

He was active in anti - Vietnam War protests and the Citizens ' Commission to Investigate the FBI, a civil rights committee for the investigation of FBI activities, and was, as in 2014 it became known primarily responsible for breaking into an FBI office on March 8, 1971 ( the night of the boxing match, Joe Frazier against Muhammad Ali ) in Media ( suburban Philadelphia ), in which the documents stored there were stolen. The collapse led to the discovery of COINTELPRO activities of the FBI in the 1960s ( the spying politically active U.S. citizens and civil rights ), after the documents were sent anonymously to newspaper editors. After the end of the Vietnam War, he withdrew from the peace movement and focused on the professional career.

He was from 1963 to 1978 married his second wife, the writer and civil rights activist Ann Morrisett Davidon ( 1925-2007 ) and had with her two daughters, of whom Ruth Davidon (* 1964) U.S. participant in rowing at the 1996 Olympics and was a doctor is in San Francisco. 1987 married Davidon again.