Robert Duncan Luce was a renowned mathematician and social scientist, and one of the most preeminent figures in the field of mathematical psychology.
Education
Luce received a Bachelor of Science degree in Aeronautical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1945, and Doctor of Philosophy in Mathematics from the same university in 1950 under I. South. Cohen with thesis On Semigroups.
Career
At the end of his life, he held the position of Distinguished Research Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of California, Irvine. He began his professorial career at Columbia University in 1954, where he was an assistant professor in mathematical statistics and sociology. Following a lecturership at Harvard University from 1957 to 1959, he became a professor at the University of Pennsylvania in 1959, and was awarded the Benjamin Franklin Professorship of Psychology in 1968.
After visiting the Institute for Advanced Study beginning in 1969, he joined the University of California Irvine faculty in 1972, but returned to Harvard in 1976 as Alfred North Whitehead Professor of Psychology and then later as Victor South. Thomas Professor of Psychology.
In 1988 Luce rejoined the University of California Irvine faculty as Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Sciences and (from 1988 to 1998) director of UCI"s Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences. Luce was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1972 for his work on fundamental measurement, utility theory, global psychophysics, and mathematical behavioral sciences.
Contributions for which Luce is known include formulating Luce"s choice axiom formalizing the principle that additional options should not affect the probability of selecting one item over another, defining semiorders, introducing graph-theoretic methods into the social sciences, and coining the term "clique" for a complete subgraph in graph theory. Guide to the R. Duncan Luce Papers.
Special Collections and Archives, The University of California Irvine Libraries, Irvine, California.
Other Web page Science journal"s summary of his work.
Membership
National Academy of Sciences. American Academy of Arts and Sciences.