Merrill M. Flood

Merrill Meeks Flood was an American mathematician, notable for developing, with Melvin Dresher, the basis of the game theoretical Prisoner's dilemma model of cooperation and conflict while at RAND in 1950. He received a master's degree in mathematics from the University of Nebraska and a doctorate from Princeton University in 1935 under Joseph Wedderburn. He worked at Princeton, and after the war at the RAND Corporation, Columbia University, the University of Michigan and the University of California, and is considered a pioneer of management science and operations research. He was a founding member of TIMS and its second president in 1955, and in 1961 was elected president of the Operations Research Society of America.