Duncan Luce, UC Irvine Distinguished Professor of cognitive sciences, helped to shape modern psychology and game theory in the 1950s, earning him the National Medal of Science  and cementing UC Irvine’s reputation as an academic leader in the field. Now, to mark the centennial of his birth, his wife, Carolyn Scheer, has endowed a new graduate fellowship to honor and extend his legacy.

The Luce Family Fellowship in Mathematical and Behavioral Sciences will support a doctoral candidate whose work relates to the field Luce pioneered. Recipients can come from any department at UC Irvine, the campus where Luce dedicated the last 25 years of his career, until his death in 2012.

“I am delighted to make this gift ahead of Duncan’s birthday,” said Scheer. “It is fitting that he is remembered both for his scholarship as well as someone who truly believed in the importance of graduate teaching and research here at UC Irvine.”

Dean of the School of Social Sciences Bill Maurer added: “The R. Duncan Luce Endowment creates a lasting legacy for Carolyn and Duncan, both cherished members of our UC Irvine community. I am deeply grateful to Carolyn for celebrating what would have been Duncan’s 100th birthday with this generous gift that ensures that future UC Irvine graduate students will not only learn about his work but also feel his support.”

A ‘peripatetic academic’

Born in 1925 in Scranton, Pennsylvania, Luce matriculated at MIT in 1941, joining the US Navy V12 program, graduating with a bachelor’s in aeronautical engineering in1945. He trained as a catapult and arresting officer, joining the shakedown cruise of the aircraft carrier USS Kearsage as a 2nd lieutenant. He had a lifelong love of aviation, and he later earned his private pilot’s license and owned and flew a small plane.

When Luce returned to MIT, he earned a doctorate in mathematics, focusing on algebra and semi groups, and launched his career as a self-described “peripatetic academic.” Luce first got involved with mathematical and behavioral science at MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics before moving to research fellowship positions at Columbia University and Harvard University, then joining the academic faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, before moving to UC Irvine in 1972.

By 1972, Luce had published seminal books including Games and Decisions,  and Individual Choice Behavior, which introduced the eponymous Luce’s choice axiom. That principle, which informs psychology, economics and marketing, states that if you choose an apple over an orange and then are offered a banana, the new option will not make you change your original preference from apple to orange. Several 21st century Nobel Prizes have been awarded to economists who built upon this and other game theory concepts Luce developed – including three laureates who visited UCI in 2008 for a U.S. Society of Mathematical Psychology meeting honoring Luce and his many contributions,

Luce left UCI for Harvard in 1975 and chaired the Department of Psychology and Social Relations for several years. It was during this time in Cambridge, Massachusetts that Luce met Carolyn Scheer through a mutual friend, UCI economics professor Charles Lave. Scheer was early in her career, working in the personnel department at MIT.

“Duncan was a wonderful man in every sense. He was smart, he was kind, he was gentle, he was interested in the world around him. He had a sense of humor – and he had a sense of who he was,” Scheer says. The two married in 1988 and then spent their years together in Irvine.

Happy return

A once-in-a-life offer brought Luce back to Irvine in 1988 to establish and serve as the founding director of the Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences. Luce and UC Irvine cognitive sciences professor Louis Narens were spending a sabbatical year working on mathematical behavioral sciences projects with Jean-Claude Falmagne, who was at New York University. Social sciences dean at the time, William Schoenfeld, and Jack Yellot, then-chair of cognitive sciences, worked with Narens to bring Luce back to Irvine as a Distinguished Professor. Falmagne was also recruited to become a founding member of the institute. Luce, Narens, Falmagne and others, spent the next decade building up the center to become a nationally recognized powerhouse in the field.

“The job of building IMBS was custom-made for him,” Scheer says. “It featured his interests, and UCI had a national, if not international, reputation in mathematical psychology.” Luce was interested in interdisciplinary research and collaboration, a strength at UC Irvine.

“Duncan had a lot of interests, and he was not shy about drawing on what he could learn from others,” says Scheer. This extended beyond research into personal friendships. “At UCI, we had the pleasure of knowing colleagues from many departments—our dinner parties were always lively and full of interesting conversations.”

The Luces lived on campus and for nearly a dozen years, hosted a well-known New Year’s Day party in University Hills. During their years together, Scheer was also active on campus and in the community, serving as a career counselor at the former Women’s Opportunity Center, and as a board member for the Newport Beach Public Library’s adult literacy program as well as volunteering for University Hills’ Homeowners Representative Board and Condo II. She often traveled with Luce for conferences and research trips, both in the U.S. and abroad.

“Every marriage has its ups and downs, but being married to Duncan was truly wonderful,” she says. “I deeply value our life together. This endowment honors our commitment to UCI and mathematical and behavioral sciences.”

Lasting legacy

When President George W. Bush presented Luce with the National Medal of Science at a ceremony in 2005, he praised Luce’s belt buckle – a Navajo silver flower that reflected Bush’s own cowboy aesthetic. Luce collected Native American pieces over the years, often on trips he and Carolyn took together, and those accessories were part of his signature style.

Luce received countless awards and was elected to the most prestigious academic groups, including the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. Luce was also proud of his less celebrated but still influential service to the academic community. His service to the NAS included co-chairing the committee on long-range planning for the social sciences serving on the Report Review Committee. In 1976, Luce chaired a delegation of U.S. psychologists charged with setting up a scientific exchange between the U.S. and Soviet academies of sciences. This resulted in chairing a delegation to Moscow in the early 1980s, and hosting Russian researchers at UCI for a scientific exchange in the 1990s. Luce served twice as president of the Federation of Behavioral, Psychological and Cognitive Sciences; president of the Society for Mathematical Psychology; chair of the American Association for the Advancement of Science Psychology Section; and chair of the National Academy of Sciences Psychology Section.

Luce’s legacy endures among the many behavioral scientists he taught or influenced over the years. In the 1990s, he received grants to bring psychology faculty and graduate students from across the country to UCI each summer to learn about mathematical modeling, propagating these  theories and practices to new generations of behavioral scientists.

Luce’s death in 2012 elicited an outpouring of appreciation from scholars from Harvard to the National Academies to his many professional societies. But nowhere was his loss more deeply felt than at UC Irvine. Jeffrey Rouder, the Jean-Claude Falmagne Chair of Mathematical Psychology at UC Irvine, was among the last cohort of graduate students to be advised by Luce.

“There’s a sense in which this fellowship comes full circle for me,” says Rouder. When Luce and Falmagne first came to Irvine, they wrote grant proposals – not to fund their own work but to support graduate student researchers like Rouder pursuing their own work. Rouder distinctly remembers Luce saying that graduate students and post-doctoral scholars “are the life blood of the university.”

Through this endowment, Luce will continue to champion new generations of UC Irvine graduate students — scholars who will never know him personally, but who will nevertheless benefit from his enduring support and inspiration as they advance the field he helped to shape.

-Christine Byrd for UCI Social Sciences

-photos, courtesy of Carolyn Scheer, top to bottom include R. Duncan Luce, 2008; Luce, mid 50s; Luce and Scheer in Red Square, Moscow, 1990; Luce and President George W. Bush, 2002 National Medal of Science, awarded 2005.