Donald B. Gillies
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Through IBM 7030 Stretch
Early life and education
Donald B. Gillies was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, to John Zachariah Gillies (a Canadian) and Anne Isabelle Douglas MacQueen (an American). He attended the University of Toronto Schools, a laboratory school originally affiliated with the university. Gillies completed his undergraduate degree at the University of Toronto.
He began his graduate education at the University of Illinois and helped with the checkout of ORDVAC computer in the summer of 1951. After one year he transferred to Princeton to work for John von Neumann and developed the first theorems of core (game theory) in his PhD thesis.
Gillies ranked among the top ten participants in the William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition held in 1950.
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Career
Gillies moved to England for two years to work for the National Research Development Corporation. He returned to the US in 1956, married Alice E. Dunkle, and began a job as a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Starting in 1957, Gillies designed the three-stage pipeline control of the ILLIAC II supercomputer at the University of Illinois. The pipelined stages were named "advanced control", "delayed control", and "interplay". This work competed with the IBM 7030 Stretch computer and was in the public domain. Gillies presented a talk on ILLIAC II at the University of Michigan Engineering Summer Conference in 1962. During checkout of ILLIAC II, Gillies found three new Mersenne primes, one of which was the largest prime number known at the time.
In 1969, Gillies launched a project to build the first Pascal compiler written in North America, a fast-turnaround, in-memory, 2-pass compiler. The compiler, for the PDP-11/23 minicomputer, was completed before 1975.
In 1974, Gillies became the first source code licensee for the Bell Labs UNIX operating system.
Death and legacy
Gillies died unexpectedly at age 46 on July 17, 1975, of a rare viral infection.
In 1975, the Donald B. Gillies Memorial lecture was established at the University of Illinois, with one leading researcher from computer science appearing every year. The first lecturer was Alan Perlis.
In 2006, the Donald B. Gillies Chair Professorship was established in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois. Vikram Adve was invested as the second chair professor of the endowment in 2018. The Department of Computer Science awarded a Memorial Achievement Award to Gillies in 2011.