Saddle Point
Back to the cover

Part I · Foundations

  1. 0 Mathematical Foundations
  2. 1 Observation, Beliefs, and Decision

Part II · Engines

  1. 2 Competing for Allocation: The Blotto Game
  2. 3 Bargaining, Commitment, and Repeated Cooperation
  3. 4 Signals, Disclosure, and Persuasion
  4. 5 Different Models of One Game
  5. 6 Leadership and Rules: Inspection
  6. 7 Decisions in Time
  7. 8 Many Agents
  8. 9 Networks, Dependence, and Resilience
  9. 10 Aggregating Information

Part III · Systems

  1. 11 Architecture of Decision Support
  2. 12 Simulation and Wargaming with AI Agents

Part IV · Limits

  1. 13 Where the Mathematics Stops

Chapter 9 · Networks, Dependence, and Resilience

Theodore E. Harris

1919 – 2005

The problem on the desk

Harris posed the railway-capacity problem that Ford and Fulkerson explicitly acknowledge: determine how much traffic a network can carry between two specified cities.1

A life in moments

  1. 1919

    Dallas

    Born on 11 January.2

  2. 1947

    Princeton University · Princeton

    Completed a doctorate with Samuel Wilks.2

  3. 1947

    RAND Corporation · Santa Monica

    Joined RAND after his doctoral work.2

  4. 1955

    RAND Corporation · Santa Monica

    Co-authored the railway-capacity report with F. S. Ross.3

  5. 1963

    Published The Theory of Branching Processes.2

  6. 1966

    University of Southern California · Los Angeles

    Joined USC.2

  7. 2005

    Died; sources differ on the November day.2

Every line rests on a dated source (numbered below) unless it carries a mark: R for an inference, S for a story as told.

In their own words

a mathematical representation of the development of a population whose members reproduce and die, subject to laws of chance.

The Theory of Branching Processes, 19634

A story

A change of problem

Alexander’s obituary recalls that Wilks redirected Harris toward branching processes after an initial statistics problem did not advance. That change became the subject of his doctorate.2

Around Harris

  • co-author F. S. Ross Harris and Ross co-authored the 1955 railway-capacity report.3

Recorded as advisor Samuel Stanley Wilks Recorded as students Cyrus Derman, Michael Barry, Hal Forsey Mathematics Genealogy Project record

The genealogy lists only what the database records; a missing name is not a missing teacher.

The card in the book

Mathematician at the RAND Corporation (1947–66) and then at the University of Southern California. He worked on branching processes and on interacting particle systems, and Harris recurrence of Markov chains is named after him. With F. S. Ross he wrote the RAND report on the capacity of a rail network, whose object of interest was a minimum cut.

Main works “Fundamentals of a method for evaluating rail net capacities”, with F. S. Ross (RAND RM-1573, 1955); The Theory of Branching Processes (1963); “Contact interactions on a lattice” (Annals of Probability 2, 1974).

To read further

Sources (4)
  1. Maximal Flow Through a Network, L. R. Ford Jr. and D. R. Fulkerson, 1956; p. 399
  2. Obituary: Theodore E. Harris, 1919–2005, Kenneth S. Alexander, 2007; IMS Bulletin 36(2), p. 6
  3. Fundamentals of a Method for Evaluating Rail Net Capacities, T. E. Harris and F. S. Ross, 1955; RAND RM-1573; bibliographic record, 63 pages
  4. The Theory of Branching Processes, Theodore E. Harris, 1963; Publisher’s About this book text, third paragraph, definition beginning a branching process

The facts on this page were gathered for the site from the sources listed, each checked against its locator; the book's card is reproduced unchanged.