Harvard University, fas   
Spring 2000   

Choice and Chance: The Mathematics of Decision Making

Instructors

Instructors


Daniel L. Goroff is Professor of the Practice of Mathematics, Associate Director of the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning, and a Resident Tutor at Leverett House. His research interests include dynamical systems theory, optimization, and mathematical economics. He has also worked on education and science policy in Washington, most recently for the President's Science Advisor in the White House.

Howard Raiffa is the Frank P. Ramsey Professor of Managerial Economics (Emeritus), a joint chair held by the Business School and the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. He held professorial positions in the Departments of Economics and Statistics. He chaired the doctoral program in Decision Sciences. He was the first Director of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, founded during the cold war by 16 Academies of Sciences from East and West.

Raiffa uses analytical techniques to advise people how to make better decisions. He has worked in operations research, game theory, statistical decision theory, decision analysis, risk analysis, behavioral decision theory, and in conflict resolution and mediation.

In the year 2000, Raiffa will receive, for his lifetime contributions, the Dickson Prize for Science, awarded yearly by Carnegie Mellon University.

Matthew Leingang is a fifth-year graduate student in the Department of Mathematics. His thesis is in the field of symplectic geometry and Hamiltonian theories. He has taught courses in dynamical systems, fractal geometry, and chaos. Upon receiving his Ph.D. this June, he will become a Hill Assistant Professor at Rutgers University.

Paul Erickson has helped edit and design course materials with Professor Goroff since he was an undergraduate physics concentrator here at Harvard. Since graduating in the spring of 1999, he has remained in Cambridge, where he works as a consultant and free-lance writer. Most recently, he has been working on a book for young people, Daily Life in the Pilgrim Colony, 1636.



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