Robert Duncan Luce is the Distinguished Research Professor of
Cognitive ScienceCognitive science is the interdisciplinary scientific study of mind and its processes. It examines what cognition is, what it does and how it works. It includes research on how information is processed , represented, and transformed in behaviour, nervous system or machine...
at the
University of California, IrvineThe University of California, Irvine , founded in 1965, is one of the ten campuses of the University of California, located in Irvine, California, USA...
.
Luce received a B.S. in Aeronautical Engineering from the
Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyThe Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological education and research.Founded in 1861 in...
in 1945, and
PhDPHD may refer to:*Ph.D., a doctorate of philosophy*Ph.D. , a 1980s British group*PHD finger, a protein sequence*PHD Mountain Software, an outdoor clothing and equipment company*PhD Docbook renderer, an XML renderer...
in
MathematicsMathematics is the study of quantity, space, structure, and change. Mathematicians seek out patterns and formulate new conjectures. Mathematicians resolve the truth or falsity of conjectures by mathematical proofs, which are arguments sufficient to convince other mathematicians of their validity...
from the same university in 1950. He began his professorial career at
Columbia UniversityColumbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
in 1954, where he was an assistant professor in mathematical statistics and sociology. Following a lecturership at
Harvard UniversityHarvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
from 1957 to 1959, he became a professor at the
University of PennsylvaniaThe University of Pennsylvania is a private, Ivy League university located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. Penn is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States,Penn is the fourth-oldest using the founding dates claimed by each institution...
in 1959, and was awarded the Benjamin Franklin Professorship of Psychology in 1968. After visiting the
Institute for Advanced StudyThe Institute for Advanced Study, located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States, is an independent postgraduate center for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry. It was founded in 1930 by Abraham Flexner...
beginning in 1969, he joined the UC Irvine faculty in 1972, but returned to Harvard in 1976 as Alfred North Whitehead Professor of Psychology and then later as Victor S. Thomas Professor of Psychology. He was elected to the
National Academy of SciencesThe National Academy of Sciences is a corporation in the United States whose members serve pro bono as "advisers to the nation on science, engineering, and medicine." As a national academy, new members of the organization are elected annually by current members, based on their distinguished and...
in 1972 for his work on fundamental measurement, utility theory, global psychophysics, and mathematical behavioral sciences. In 1988 Luce rejoined the UC Irvine faculty as Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Sciences and (from 1988 to 1998) director of UCI's Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences. He received the 2003
National Medal of ScienceThe National Medal of Science is an honor bestowed by the President of the United States to individuals in science and engineering who have made important contributions to the advancement of knowledge in the fields of behavioral and social sciences, biology, chemistry, engineering, mathematics and...
in behavioral and social science for his contributions to the field of mathematical psychology.
Contributions for which Luce is known include formulating
Luce's choice axiomIn probability theory, Luce's choice axiom, formulated by R. Duncan Luce , states that the probability of selecting one item over another from a pool of many items is not affected by the presence or absence of other items in the pool...
formalizing the principle that additional options should not affect the probability of selecting one item over another, defining
semiorderIn order theory, a branch of mathematics, a semiorder is a type of ordering that may be determined for a set of items with numerical scores by declaring two items to be incomparable when their scores are within some threshold of each other and otherwise using the numerical comparison of their scores...
s, introducing
graph-theoreticIn mathematics and computer science, graph theory is the study of graphs, mathematical structures used to model pairwise relations between objects from a certain collection. A "graph" in this context refers to a collection of vertices or 'nodes' and a collection of edges that connect pairs of...
methods into the social sciences, and coining the term "
cliqueIn the mathematical area of graph theory, a clique in an undirected graph is a subset of its vertices such that every two vertices in the subset are connected by an edge. Cliques are one of the basic concepts of graph theory and are used in many other mathematical problems and constructions on graphs...
" for a complete subgraph in graph theory.