Charles L. Bouton

Charles Leonard Bouton ( born April 25, 1869 in St. Louis, Missouri, † February 20, 1922 ) was a professor of mathematics at Harvard University.

His parents, the engineer William Bouton and Mary Rothery Conklin, settled after the Civil War in St. Louis.

Charles became in 1891 a Master of Science at Washington University. After two years in Leipzig by Sophus Lie in 1898 he obtained his PhD and returned to Harvard. 1901/ 02, he discovered that allows the Nim game play with a mathematically simple computable strategy. This investigation is now regarded as the first result of combinatorial game theory.

In 1907 he married Mary Spencer of Baltimore, with whom he had three daughters, Elizabeth, Margaret and Charlotte.