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Scott Boorman

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Name
  
Scott Boorman


Education
  
Scott Boorman sociologyyaleedusitesdefaultfilesstylesmedi

Books
  
The Protracted Game: A Wei-chʻi Interpretation of Maoist Revolutionary Strategy, The genetics of altruism

Scott Archer Boorman (born February 1, 1949) is a mathematical sociologist at Yale University.

Contents

Life

He earned his B.A. in Applied Mathematics from Harvard University, and was a Harvard Junior Fellow. He received his Ph.D. in Sociology from Harvard University and was appointed to a full professorship at Penn before moving to Yale. He is also a graduate of Yale Law School.

Works

While still a teenager, Boorman wrote The Protracted Game : A Wei-Ch'i Interpretation of Maoist Revolutionary Strategy[1] (1969), an analysis of the U.S. involvement in Vietnam. He shows that the U.S. thought it was playing Chess, while in fact the game was Wei-Ch'i (also known as Go).

He systematically explores the similarity between the military strategies of Chinese Communist insurgency and the Chinese board game wei-ch’i, in contrast to parallel U.S. analyses of the same events. Boorman also argues that wei-chi's analysis of a strategic system presents a more sophisticated and flexible form of game theory than the traditional western models of strategic choice.

His book, Genetics of Altruism (1980) uses mathematical population genetics to analyze the development of sociality and altruism through three modes of selection: group, kin and reciprocity.

References

Scott Boorman Wikipedia


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