Brockway McMillan

Biography

Brockway McMillan (IRE Senior Member, 1954; and Fellow, 1962) was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on 30 March 1915. He received the B.S. and Ph.D. degrees in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in 1936 and 1939, respectively.

Prior to going on active duty with the U.S. Navy in 1943, he was an Instructor at M.I.T., and a Procter Fellow and H.B. Fine Instructor at Princeton University in New Jersey. During his tour of duty with the U.S. Navy, he served at the U.S. Naval Proving Ground, Dahlgren, Virginia, and at the Los Alamos Laboratory, New Mexico. In 1946, McMillan joined Bell Telephone Laboratories, Murry Hill, New Jersey, as a Research Mathematician. In 1955, he became Assistant Director of Systems Engineering, and four years later, in 1959, he was named Director of Military Research.

McMillan served as occasional Consultant to a number of offices in the Department of Defense, to the Office of Defense Mobilization, to the Weapons Systems Evaluation Group, with the the Office of the President's Special Assistant for Science and Technology. In June 1961, he was sworn in as Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Research and Development.

McMillan was a member of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (also a president of this society), the American Mathematical Society, the Mathematical Association of America, the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, the Operations Research Society, and the AAAS.