Albert W. Tucker

Albert William Tucker (28 November 1905 to 25 January 1995) was a Canadian mathematician who made important contributions in topology, game theory and non-linear programming. Born in Oshawa, Ontario, he took his degrees at the University of Toronto and then earned his doctorate at Princeton University in 1932 under Solomon Lefschetz, with a dissertation titled An Abstract Approach to Manifolds. He joined the Princeton faculty in 1933, stayed until 1974, and chaired the mathematics department for about twenty years. In 1950 he gave the prisoner dilemma its name and interpretation, and he is well known for the Karush-Kuhn-Tucker conditions in non-linear programming. He was president of the Mathematical Association of America in 1961 and 1962, worked on mathematics education, and started an oral history project on the Princeton mathematical community. His doctoral students include Michel Balinski, David Gale, John Nash and Lloyd Shapley.