We are sad to report that Bill Lucas of Claremont Graduate University passed away on June 7, 2010 after a short illness. Bill Lucas was Editor of the International Journal of Game Theory from 1978 to 1984 and a charter member of the Game Theory Society.
Bill Lucas worked in Applied Mathematics and Operations Research and was an expert on cooperative games. In that area, he is best known for his construction of a cooperative game that has no von-Neumann Morgenstern solution, answering in the negative a question that had been open for over two decades since the publication of von Neumann and Morgenstern’s book in 1944. (A Game with No Solution, Bulletin of the AMS, Vol. 74, No. 2, Mar. 1968, pp. 237-239; The Proof That a Game May Not Have a Solution, Transactions of the AMS, Vol. 137, Mar. 1969, pp. 219-229.)
Bill Lucas received his Ph.D. in 1963 from the University of Michigan under the supervision of Robert Thrall. He was professor at Cornell (1969-1984) and at Claremont Graduate University (since 1984), and according to the Mathematics Genealogy Project had 21 Ph.D. students in total, including game theorists Pradeep Dubey, Ehud Kalai, Shigeo Muto, Robert Weber, and others. The following is a detailed CV until 1993.
Bill Lucas was known to his friends and students as a kind and generous man and will be greatly missed.