Rufus Isaacs (game theorist)

Rufus Philip Isaacs ( born June 11, 1914 in New York City, † 1977) was an American mathematician who worked on game theory.

Life

Isaacs studied engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) with a bachelor's degree in 1936, and at Columbia University, where in 1940 he received his master's degree in mathematics and received his doctorate in 1942 at Edward Kasner (A finite difference function theory ). By 1947 he was at the University of Notre Dame and from 1948 to 1955 at the RAND Corporation. After that he worked as a mathematician at companies in the aircraft industry, the Institute for Defense Analyses and the Center for Naval Analyses. 1967 to 1977 he was Professor of Applied Mathematics at Johns Hopkins University.

He is known especially for work in game theory, differential games specifically, the study of which he founded. The work began at the Rand Corporation, but were then usually classified as secret and his monograph on differential games was not published until a decade later in 1963 ( for 1965 he was awarded the Lancaster price). The Rand Corporation, he worked with, among others, John Milnor, John F. Nash, Lloyd S. Shapley, David Blackwell and Richard Bellman. With Bellman, he also worked in the area of ​​the west founded by Bellman Dynamic Programming and found in 1954/55 a version of the Pontryagin maximum principle, named after Lew.

He was married in 1942 and had two daughters.

Writings

• Differential Games, John Wiley 1965