William Davidon

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William Cooper Davidon (born March 18, 1927 in Fort Lauderdale , Florida , † November 8, 2013 ) was an American physicist and mathematician who dealt with theoretical physics and numerical analysis. He was also a civil rights activist.

Davidon graduated from the University of Chicago with a bachelor's degree in 1947, a master's degree in 1950 and a doctorate in 1954 ( A proper time formalism ). In 1943/44 he was an electronics engineer at Mines Equipment Corporation and from 1948 to 1954 Research Director at Nuclear Instrumentation and Chemical Corporation . From 1954 to 1956 he was at the Enrico Fermi Institute at the University of Chicago and from 1956 to 1961 at the Argonne National Laboratory , before becoming an associate professor and later professor of physics at Haverford College in 1969 . In 1981 he switched to a professorship for mathematics. In 1991 he retired.

In 1966/67 he was a Fulbright Scholar at Aarhus University and in 1976/77 at Trondheim University . He was involved in the development of the first quasi-Newton method , the Davidon-Fletcher-Powell algorithm. It is also named after Roger Fletcher and Michael JD Powell , who developed the process further in 1963.

He was active in anti- Vietnam War protests and on the Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI , a civil rights committee investigating FBI activities, and, as it became known in 2014, was primarily responsible for a break-in of an FBI office on March 8, 1971 (the night of Joe Frazier's boxing match against Muhammad Ali ) in Media (a suburb of Philadelphia ), in which the documents stored there were stolen. The break-in led to the exposure of the FBI's COINTELPRO activities in the 1960s (the spying of politically active US citizens and civil rights activists) after the documents were anonymously sent to newspaper offices. After the end of the Vietnam War, he withdrew from the peace movement and focused on his professional career.

He was married to the writer and civil rights activist Ann Morrisett Davidon (1925-2007) from 1963 to 1978 and had two daughters, of whom Ruth Davidon (* 1964) was a US rowing participant at the 1996 Olympic Games and a doctor is in San Francisco. In 1987 Davidon married again.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Life and career data according to American Men and Women of Science , Thomson Gale 2004
  2. ^ William Davidon: Variable metric method for minimization . In: Argonne National Laboratory (Ed.): AEC Research and Development Report . ANL-5990, 1959.
  3. ^ JE Dennis, Jr, Jorge J. Moré: Quasi-Newton Methods, Motivation and Theory . In: SIAM Review . tape 19 , no. 1 , 1977, pp. 46-89 , JSTOR : 2029325 .
  4. ↑ Mark Mazzetti: Burglars Who Took On FBI Abandon Shadows . In: New York Times . January 7, 2014 (English, nytimes.com ).
personal data
SURNAME Davidon, William
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Davidon, William Cooper (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American physicist and mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH March 18, 1927
PLACE OF BIRTH Fort Lauderdale , Florida
DATE OF DEATH November 8, 2013