As a child Duncan Luce liked painting pictures and was fascinated with airplanes. His parents swayed him against an artistic career and an astigmatism kept him from becoming a military pilot. But Luce, Distinguished Research Professor of Cognitive Science & Economics with the School of Social Sciences, has been flying high for years and continues to create new ideas in his field.

While most think it’s an oxymoron to use math and psychology in the same sentence, Luce says there’s an inherent link between them. “Given the fact that people manage to live together in a fairly reasonable way most of the time, there have to be behavioral regularities,” he says. “Mathematical behavioral science attempts to formulate such regularities."

It is that link between math and science that distinguishes Luce from many of his colleagues and UC Irvine from most other universities. “When the campus was set up in the mid-60s, they hired a bunch of maverick people who were quite interesting intellectually,” says Luce. “The School developed in directions that were not very conventional.”

Luce was lucky enough to have the informal tutelage of noted behavioral scientists like Noam Chomsky, William McGill, George Miller, and Walter Rosenblith. He has been associated with distinguished universities like Columbia, Harvard, and Penn, but he has called UC Irvine home since 1988, which he says has been a “very rich intellectual environment.”

Commenting on the School of Social Sciences, Luce says, “I think the two most striking things here are the mathematical flavor of a lot of the work and the interdisciplinary flavor. There’s been talk about both of these things elsewhere, but I think it’s more pervasive here than virtually anywhere else.”

From the time he received his math Ph.D. from MIT, Luce applied that background to the behavioral sciences. It was a newly developing approach that took a decade or more to be well accepted. “When I entered the field it was right after WWII and there was a big change underway at that point,” says Luce.

But now, more than 50 years into his career, Luce is hailed as one of the most influential figures in the field of mathematical psychology. He has received numerous awards and accolades including the UCI Medal, a Gold Medal Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Science of Psychology from the American Psychological Foundation in 2001, the Daniel G. Aldrich Jr. Distinguished University Service Award for 2003-04, and the 2004 Norman Anderson Award. He has also been recognized with membership in other distinguished organizations, including the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the National Academy of Sciences.

One of his many publications, Individual Choice Behavior, has received wide recognition as a groundbreaking book and some of its ideas are widely used in graduate classrooms across the country. UC Berkeley economist Daniel McFadden cited Luce’s work upon receiving his 2000 Nobel Prize. “In a fully just world there would be a Nobel Prize for psychology,” he said. “And Duncan Luce would have long since received it.”

Perhaps there will be, and if Luce has his way, he’ll still be in the running. Motivated by “the challenge of new problems and the rewards of getting some problems solved” he is looking forward to many years of continued work in his field.

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