Logic List Mailing Archive

David Gale (1921-2008)

David Gale, a charter member of the Game Theory Society, died on March 7, 
2008, following a heart attack, in Berkeley, California. He was 86 and 
very active until the day of his heart attack.

David Gale was among the founders of game theory in Princeton. He received 
his PhD in Princeton in 1949 with a dissertation on "Finite solutions of 
two-person games". His advisor was Albert Tucker, who also supervised John 
Nash and Lloyd Shapley. David Gale, Harold Kuhn and Albert Tucker won the 
von Neumann Theory Prize in 1980 for their seminal role in laying the 
foundations of game theory, linear and non-linear programming.

In game theory, one of his seminal contributions was his joint paper with 
Lloyd Shapley, "College admissions and the stability of marriage", 
American Mathematical Monthly 69 (1962), pp. 9-15, which started a whole 
research area on stable matchings and their applications.

A collection of papers dedicated to David Gale on the occasion of his 85th 
birthday is forthcoming in the International Journal of Game Theory, 
Volume 36, Numbers 3-4, March, 2008, and accessible online to GTS members.

This volume is edited by Marilda Sotomayor, who had also organized a 
scientific day in David's honour during the 18th Summer Festival on Game 
Theory in Stony Brook, July 12/13, 2007. The preface to the IJGT volume 
summarizes many other fundamental contributions of David Gale to 
mathematical economics and is available at 
http://www.gametheorysociety.org/bulletin/ijgt_gale_preface.pdf

David Gale's work is of astonishing breadth and full of mathematical 
beauty. Less known to game theorists are probably his contributions to 
geometry. To name some that bear his name, the Gale transform and the Gale 
diagram allow to describe and visualize polytopes in high dimension which 
do not have too many vertices. The Gale evenness condition characterizes 
the "cyclic polytopes", which, for example, have any number of vertices in 
dimension four so that any two of them are connected by an edge on the 
outside of the polytope. In the familiar dimension three, this cannot 
happen with more than four vertices, nor does it apply to a cube in 
dimension four, and it shows how our imagination goes astray in higher 
dimensions.

An excellent article that summarizes his work is 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Gale

David Gale wrote a Mathematical Entertainments column for the Mathematical 
Intelligencer from 1991 through 1997. The book "Tracking the Automatic 
Ant" (1998) collects these columns.

In 2004 David Gale developed MathSite,

http://mathsite.math.berkeley.edu/intro.html a pedagogic website that uses 
interactive exhibits to illustrate important mathematical ideas. MathSite 
won the 2007 Pirelli Internetional Award for Science Communication in 
Mathematics.

David Gale is survived by his partner, Sandra Gilbert, his three 
daughters, and his grandchildren.

Bernhard von Stengel
Vice-President for Communications of the Game Theory Society