2009年7月31日 星期五

Herbert Ellis Robbins

1989 NTU Review had a translation of an interview


(1917–2001; b. Newcastle, PA; d. Princeton, NJ) American mathematical statistician. Robbins obtained his PhD from Harvard U in 1938. After a spell in the United States Navy, he joined Hotelling at UNC. In 1952 he moved to Columbia U where he spent the rest of his career. He was the Neyman Lecturer of the IMS in 1982, having been its Rietz Lecturer in 1963, its President in 1965, and its Wald Lecturer in 1969. He was the COPSS Fisher Lecturer in 1993. He was elected to membership of both the NAS and the AAAS.


Herbert Ellis Robbins (January 12, 1915 in New Castle, PennsylvaniaFebruary 12, 2001 in Princeton, New Jersey) was a mathematician and statistician who did research in topology, measure theory, statistics, and a variety of other fields. He was the co-author, with Richard Courant, of What is Mathematics?, a popularization that is still (as of 2007) in print. The Robbins lemma, used in empirical Bayes methods, is named after him. Robbins algebras are named after him because of a conjecture (since proved) that he posed concerning Boolean algebras. The Robbins theorem, in graph theory, is also named after him. The well-known unsolved problem of minimizing in sequential selection the expected rank of the selected item under under full information, sometimes referred to as the fourth secretary problem, also bears his name: Robbins' problem (of optimal stopping).

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Biography

As an undergraduate, Robbins attended Harvard University, where Marston Morse influenced him to become interested in mathematics. Robbins received a doctorate from Harvard in 1938 and was an instructor at New York University from 1939 to 1941. After World War II, Robbins taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 1946 to 1952, then spent a year at the Institute for Advanced Study. In 1953, he became a professor of mathematical statistics at Columbia University. He retired from full-time activity at Columbia in 1985 and was then a professor at Rutgers University until his retirement in 1997.

In 1955, Robbins introduced empirical Bayes methods at the Third Berkeley Symposium on Mathematical Statistics and Probability. Robbins was also one of the inventors of the first stochastic approximation algorithm, the Robbins-Monro method, and worked on the theory of power-one tests and optimal stopping.

Selected writings

  • A theorem on graphs with an application to a problem on traffic control, American Mathematical Monthly, 46:281-283, 1939.
  • What is Mathematics?: An elementary approach to ideas and methods, with Richard Courant, London: Oxford University Press, 1941.
  • The central limit theorem for dependent random variables, with Wassily Hoeffding, Duke Mathematical Journal 15 (1948), pp. 773–780.
  • A stochastic approximation method, with Sutton Monro, Annals of Mathematical Statistics 22, #3 (September 1951), pp. 400–407.
  • An empirical Bayes approach to statistics, in Proceedings of the Third Berkeley Symposium on Mathematical Statistics and Probability, Jerzy Neyman, ed., vol. 1, Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1956, pp. 157–163.

References

  • "The Contributions of Herbert Robbins to Mathematical Statistics", Tze Leung Lai and David Siegmund, Statistical Science 1, #2 (May 1986), pp. 276–284. Euclid
  • In Memoriam, ISI Newsletter 25, #3 (2001)
  • "What is known about Robbins' Problem?", F. Thomas Bruss, Journal of Applied Probability Volume 42, #1 (2005), pp. 108–120 Euclid
  • "A continuous-time approach to Robbins' problem of minimizing the expected rank", F. Thomas Bruss and Yves Coamhin Swan, Journal of Applied Probability , Volume 46 #1, 1–18, (2009).

External links

2009年7月30日 星期四

The Shaw Prize

有錢設獎卻不過餌爾爾


邵逸夫獎英文The Shaw Prize)由香港著名的電影製作人邵逸夫爵士於2002年11月創立。首屆的頒獎禮在2004年9月7日在香港舉行。邵逸夫獎基金會每年選出世界上在數學醫學天文學三方面有成就的科學家,頒授一百萬美元獎金以作表揚。並設有天文學獎、生命科學與醫學獎、數學科學獎,共三個獎項;它是個國際性獎項,形式模仿諾貝爾獎,由邵逸夫獎基金會有限公司作管理。

The Shaw Prize

2009年7月27日 星期一

Norbert Elias

Norbert Elias (June 22, 1897August 1, 1990) was a German sociologist of Jewish descent, who later became a British citizen.

His work focused on the relationship between power, behavior, emotion, and knowledge over time. He significantly shaped what is called process or figurational sociology. Due to historical circumstances, Elias had long remained a marginal author, until being rediscovered by a new generation of scholars in the 1970s, when he eventually became one of the most influential sociologists in the history of the field.

Interest in his work can be partly attributed to the fact that his concept of large social figurations or networks explains the emergence and function of large societal structures without neglecting the aspect of individual agency. In the 1960s and 1970s, the overemphasis of structure over agency was heavily criticized about the then-dominant school of structural functionalism.

Elias' most important work is the two-volume The Civilizing Process (Über den Prozess der Zivilisation). Originally published in 1939, it was virtually ignored until its republication in 1969, when its first volume was also translated into English. The first volume traces the historical developments of the European habitus, or "second nature," the particular individual psychic structures molded by social attitudes. Elias traced how post-medieval European standards regarding violence, sexual behaviour, bodily functions, table manners and forms of speech were gradually transformed by increasing thresholds of shame and repugnance, working outward from a nucleus in court etiquette. The internalized "self-restraint" imposed by increasingly complex networks of social connections developed the "psychological" self-perceptions that Freud recognized as the "super-ego." The second volume of The Civilizing Process looks into the causes of these processes and finds them in the increasingly centralized Early Modern state and the increasingly differentiated and interconnected web of society.

When Elias' work found a larger audience in the 1960s, at first his analysis of the process was misunderstood as an extension of discredited "social Darwinism," the idea of upward "progress" was dismissed by reading it as consecutive history rather than a metaphor for a social process.

The Quest for Excitement, written by Norbert Elias with Eric Dunning, and published in 1986 has proved a seminal work for the sociology of sport, and of football in particular. The Centre for the Sociology of Sport at the University of Leicester, England is host to a number of important sociologists who work on the Elias and Dunning tradition.

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Biography

Elias was born on June 22, 1897 in Breslau (Wrocław) in Silesia to Hermann and Sophie Elias. His father was a businessman in the textile industry and his mother, as usual at the time, a housewife. After passing the abitur in 1915 he volunteered for the German army in World War I and was employed as a telegrapher, first at the Eastern front, then at the Western front. After suffering a nervous breakdown in 1917, he was declared unfit for service and was posted to Wroclaw as a medical orderly. The same year, Elias began studying philosophy, psychology and medicine at the University of Breslau, in addition spending a term each at the universities of Heidelberg (where he attended lectures by Karl Jaspers) and Freiburg in 1919 and 1920. He quit medicine in 1919 after passing the preliminary examination (Physikum). To finance his studies after his father's fortune had been reduced by hyperinflation, he took up a job as the head of the export department in a local hardware factory 1922. In 1924, he graduated with a doctoral dissertation in philosophy entitled Idee und Individuum ("Idea and Individual") supervised by Richard Hönigswald, a representative of Neo-Kantianism. Disappointed about the absence of the social aspect from Neo-Kantianism, which had led to a serious dispute with his supervisor about his dissertation, Elias decided to turn to sociology for his further studies.

During his Breslau years, until 1925, Elias was deeply involved in the German Zionist movement, and acted as one of the leading intellectuals within the German-Jewish youth movement "Blau-Weiss" (Blue-White). During these years he got acquainted with other young zionists like Erich Fromm, Leo Strauss, Leo Löwenthal and Gershom Scholem. In 1925, Elias moved to Heidelberg, where Alfred Weber accepted him as a candidate for a habilitation (second book project) on the development of modern science, entitled Die Bedeutung der Florentiner Gesellschaft und Kultur für die Entstehung der Wissenschaft (The Significance of Florentine Society and Culture for the Development of Science). In 1930 Elias chose to cancel this project and followed Karl Mannheim to become his assistant at the University of Frankfurt. However, after the Nazi take-over in early 1933, Mannheim's sociological institute was forced to close. The already submitted habilitation thesis entitled Der höfische Mensch ("The Man of the Court") was never formally accepted and not published until 1969. In 1933, Elias fled to Paris. His elderly parents remained in Breslau, where his father died in 1940; his mother was deported to Auschwitz, where she probably was killed in 1941.

During his two years in Paris, Elias worked as a private scholar supported by a scholarship from the Amsterdam Steunfonds Foundation. In 1935, he moved on to Great Britain, where he worked on his magnum opus, The Civilizing Process, until 1939, now supported by a scholarship from a relief organization for Jewish refugees. In 1939, he met up with his former supervisor Mannheim at the London School of Economics, where he obtained a position as Senior Research Assistant. In 1940, when an invasion of Britain by German forces appeared imminent, Elias was detained at internment camps in Liverpool and on the Isle of Man for eight months, on account of his being German. During his internment he organized political lectures and staged a drama he had written himself, Die Ballade vom armen Jakob (The Ballad of Poor Jacob) (eventually published in 1987).

Upon his release in 1941, he moved to Cambridge. He taught evening classes for the Workers' Educational Association (the adult education organization), and later evening extension courses in sociology, psychology, economics and economic history at the University of Leicester. He also held occasional lectureships at other institutions of higher learning. While in Cambridge, he trained as a group therapist under the psychoanalyst S. H. Foulkes, another German emigrant, with whom he co-founded the Group Analytic Society in 1952 and worked as a group therapist.

In 1954, he moved to Leicester, where he became a lecturer at, and contributed to the development of, the University's Department of Sociology, until his retirement in 1962. At Leicester, his students included John Eldridge and Anthony Giddens.

From 1962 to 1964, Elias taught as professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Ghana in Legon near Accra. After his return to Europe in 1965, he based himself in Amsterdam but travelled much as a visiting professor, mainly at German universities. His reputation and popularity grew immensely after the republication of The Civilising Process in 1969. From 1978 to 1984 he worked at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research at the University of Bielefeld.

Elias was the first ever laureate of both the Theodor W. Adorno Award (1977) and the European Amalfi Prize for Sociology and Social Sciences (1987).

Outside his sociological work he sporadically also wrote poetry and essays.

Elias died at his home in Amsterdam on 1 August 1990.

Selected Bibliography

Books

(In chronological order, by date of original publication)

  • 1939: Über den Prozeß der Zivilisation. Soziogenetische und psychogenetische Untersuchungen. Erster Band. Wandlungen des Verhaltens in den weltlichen Oberschichten des Abendlandes and Zweiter Band. Wandlungen der Gesellschaft. Entwurf einer Theorie der Zivilisation. Basel: Verlag Haus zum Falken. (Published in English as The Civilizing Process, Vol.I. The History of Manners, Oxford: Blackwell, 1969, and The Civilizing Process, Vol.II. State Formation and Civilization, Oxford: Blackwell, 1982).

[2000, The Civilizing Process. Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations. Revised edition of 1994. Oxford, Blackwell].

  • 1965 (with John L. Scotson): The Established and the Outsiders. A Sociological Enquiry into Community Problems, London: Frank Cass & Co. (Originally published in English.)
  • 1969: Die höfische Gesellschaft. Untersuchungen zur Soziologie des Königtums und der höfischen Aristokratie (based on the 1933 habilitation). Neuwied/Berlin: Luchterhand. (Published in English translation by Edmund Jephcott as The Court Society, Oxford: Blackwell, 1983).
  • 1970: Was ist Soziologie?. München: Juventa. (Published in English as What is Sociology?, London: Hutchinson, 1978).
  • 1982: Über die Einsamkeit der Sterbenden in unseren Tagen, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. (Published in English as The Loneliness of the Dying, Oxford: Blackwell, 1985).
  • 1982 (edited with Herminio Martins and Richard Whitley): Scientific Establishments and Hierarchies. Sociology of the Sciences Yearbook 1982, Dordrecht: Reidel.
  • 1983: Engagement und Distanzierung. Arbeiten zur Wissenssoziologie I, edited by Michael Schröter, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. (Published in English as Involvement and Detachment. Contributions to the Sociology of Knowledge, Oxford: Blackwell, 1987.)
  • 1984: Über die Zeit. Arbeiten zur Wissenssoziologie II, edited by Michael Schröter, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. (Published in English as Time. An Essay, Oxford: Blackwell, 1991).
  • 1985: Humana conditio. Betrachtungen zur Entwicklung der Menschheit am 40. Jahrestag eines Kriegsendes (8. Mai 1985), Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. (Not available in English).
  • 1986 (with Eric Dunning): Quest for Excitement. Sport and Leisure in the Civilizing Process. Oxford: Blackwell.
  • 1987: Die Gesellschaft der Individuen, edited by Michael Schröter, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. (Original 1939, published in English as The Society of Individuals, Oxford: Blackwell, 1991).
  • 1987: Los der Menschen. Gedichte, Nachdichtungen, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. (Poetry, not available in English).
  • 1989: Studien über die Deutschen. Machtkämpfe und Habitusentwicklung im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, edited by Michael Schröter, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. (Published in English as The Germans. Power struggles and the development of habitus in the 19th and 20th centuries, Cambridge: Polity Press 1996.)
  • 1990: Über sich selbst, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. (Published in English as Reflections on a life, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994).
  • 1991: Mozart. Zur Soziologie eines Genies, edited by Michael Schröter, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. (Published in English as Mozart. Portrait of a Genius, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993).
  • 1991: The Symbol Theory. London: Sage. (Originally published in English.)
  • 1996: Die Ballade vom armen Jakob, Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag (Drama, not available in English).
  • 1998: Watteaus Pilgerfahrt zur Insel der Liebe, Weitra (Austria): Bibliothek der Provinz (Not available in English).
  • 1998: The Norbert Elias Reader: A Biographical Selection, edited by Johan Goudsblom and Stephen Mennell, Oxford: Blackwell.
  • 1999: Zeugen des Jahrhunderts. Norbert Elias im Gespräch mit Hans Christian Huf, edited by Wolfgang Homering, Berlin: Ullstein. (Interview, not available in English).
  • 2002: Frühschriften. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. (Early writings, not available in English.)
  • 2004: Gedichte und Sprüche. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. (Translations of poems in English and French).

See also:

Norbert Elias, by Robert van Krieken, London: Routledge, 1998; La sociologie de Norbert Elias, by Nathalie Heinich, Paris: La Découverte, 2002 (in French).

Articles

External links




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2009年7月25日 星期六

保时捷“维德金“时代划上句号

德国经济 | 2009.07.25

保时捷“维德金“时代划上句号

在保时捷总裁维德金被迫离职后,德国经济史上的一场史无前例的权力争夺战,也随之偃旗息鼓。大众汽车和保时捷的合并计划目前已经获得大众公司监理会的批准。大众集团表示,合并后保时捷将保留最大的自主权。这种结局让博弈双方都犹如卸下了重负,双方都表示满意。

在保时捷和大众的这场权力争夺战终于画上句号时,对立双方都对最终达成的结果表示满意。下萨克森州州长乌尔夫同大众公司一样,充满了得胜的喜悦。乌尔夫表示:"对于保时捷和大众这两家公司来说, 对于这两家股份公司来说,合并是一件好事。双方都可以从中受益。"

大众公司总裁温特克尔在公司监事会举行会议,批准了同保时捷合并的计划后兴奋地说:"我们将依靠我们的技术优势一道向前迈进,我们将在国际市场上创造更加辉煌的业绩。"

失败的一方保时捷也称,合并是个不错的解决办法。就连被迫辞职的保时捷CEO维德金在正式辞职后数小时也表示:"如果说今后的计划是要打造一个大型康采恩的话,那么我必须要说的是,这原本就是我们公司的战略,因此这个决定是正确的。"

至于维德金说这番话究竟有多少诚意,这个问题可以暂且搁置一边,但维德金得到了5千万欧元的离职补偿费却是事实。由于维德金在斯图加特保时捷公司享 有崇高威望,企业职工委员会主席乌韦·绪克宣布,为这位德国薪金最高的CEO举办一个隆重的欢送仪式。绪克宣布:"我们将为维德金博士举行一个盛大的内部 欢送仪式。”

新开端Bildunterschrift: 新开端

合并后在大众公司旗下,保时捷仍将保留自己的品牌和在斯图加特祖芬豪森的总部。下萨克森州州长乌尔夫强调说:"我们大家都知道,保时捷这个品牌简直象个神话,因此我们要继续培养和发展这个品牌。保时捷将是个拥有高度自主权的企业。"

这个消息对于保时捷公司的800多名员工来说,无疑是个重要的消息。由于收购大众汽车股份保时捷欠下了100亿欧元的债务。员工代表表示:"希望我 们的就业岗位能够保留下去。希望我们的公司能够继续运作下去。我相信,我们公司能够保持高度自主权的这个消息,会让公司里的所有人感到高兴。对于我们,对 于公司的所有工作人员,对于公司来说,这场争夺战终于能够找到一条出路,平静下来是件好事情。"

到8月中旬之前将出台一个基本协议。其中将包括卡塔尔成为大股东并将注资50亿欧元的内容。这意味着德国历史上规模最大的权力争夺战的平息,也意味着保时捷维德金时代的终结。维德金表示:"这让我感到十分难过。但尽管如此,我们也不得不遗憾地划上一个句号。"


作者:Knut Bauer/韩明芳

责编:石涛

2009年7月9日 星期四

「KJ法」の川喜田二郎さん死去

「KJ法」の川喜田二郎さん死去


川喜田二郎さん

 ユニークな発想法「KJ法」の創始者で、ヒマラヤなどの学術調査で知られる文化人類学者の川喜田二郎(かわきた・じろう)氏が8日、死去した。

 89歳だった。告別式は親族のみで行い、後日お別れ会を開く予定。

 三重県生まれ。京大に進み、山岳部に籍を置く。人類学者の今西錦司の薫陶を受け、野外調査に取り組んだ。卒業後は東工大などの教授を歴任した。

 専門は文化人類学、民族地理学。1953年にマナスル登山隊に参加して以来、ネパール、ヒマラヤの現地調査を続け、「鳥葬の国」などのノンフィク ションから「素朴と文明」といった独自の文明論まで、幅広く手がけた。その一方で、環境保護や、ネパールにふさわしい形の技術協力を進め、アジアのノーベ ル賞といわれるマグサイサイ賞なども受けている。

 また、ユニークな発想・情報整理法で、世界で高く評価されている「KJ法」を考案、自ら普及につとめた。他の著書に「発想法」「チームワーク」など。

2009年7月9日14時52分 読売新聞)

2009年7月6日 星期一

Robert S. McNamara

6日晚就從bbc知道此消息紐約時報隔夜在發此 有點慢 可是很詳實

Robert S. McNamara, Former Defense Secretary, Dies at 93


Published: July 6, 2009

Robert S. McNamara, the powerful defense secretary who helped lead the nation into the maelstrom of Vietnam and spent the rest of his life wrestling with the war’s moral consequences, died Monday at his home in Washington. He was 93.

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Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara at a news conference at the Pentagon in 1965. More Photos »

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His wife, Diana, said Mr. McNamara died in his sleep at 5:30 a.m., adding that he had been in failing health for some time.

Mr. McNamara was the most influential defense secretary of the 20th century. Serving Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson from 1961 to 1968, he oversaw hundreds of military missions, thousands of nuclear weapons and billions of dollars in military spending and foreign arms sales. He also enlarged the defense secretary’s role, handling foreign diplomacy and the dispatch of troops to enforce civil rights in the South.

“He’s like a jackhammer,” Johnson said. “No human being can take what he takes. He drives too hard. He is too perfect.”

As early as April 1964, Senator Wayne Morse, Democrat of Oregon, called Vietnam “McNamara’s War.” Mr. McNamara did not object. “I am pleased to be identified with it,” he said, “and do whatever I can to win it.”

Half a million American soldiers went to war on his watch. More than 16,000 died; 42,000 more would fall in the seven years to come.

The war became his personal nightmare. Nothing he did, none of the tools at his command — the power of American weapons, the forces of technology and logic, or the strength of American soldiers — could stop the armies of North Vietnam and their South Vietnamese allies, the Vietcong. He concluded well before leaving the Pentagon that the war was futile, but he did not share that insight with the public until late in life.

In 1995, he took a stand against his own conduct of the war, confessing in a memoir that it was “wrong, terribly wrong.” In return, he faced a firestorm of scorn.

“Mr. McNamara must not escape the lasting moral condemnation of his countrymen,” The New York Times said in a widely discussed editorial, written by the page’s editor at the time, Howell Raines. “Surely he must in every quiet and prosperous moment hear the ceaseless whispers of those poor boys in the infantry, dying in the tall grass, platoon by platoon, for no purpose. What he took from them cannot be repaid by prime-time apology and stale tears, three decades late.”

By then he wore the expression of a haunted man. He could be seen in the streets of Washington — stooped, his shirttail flapping in the wind — walking to and from his office a few blocks from the White House, wearing frayed running shoes and a thousand-yard stare.

He had spent decades thinking through the lessons of the war. The greatest of these was to know one’s enemy — and to “empathize with him,” as Mr. McNamara explained in Errol Morris’s 2003 documentary, “The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara.”

“We must try to put ourselves inside their skin and look at us through their eyes,” he said. The American failure in Vietnam, he said, was seeing the enemy through the prism of the cold war, as a domino that would topple the nations of Asia if it fell.

In the film, Mr. McNamara described the American firebombing of Japan’s cities in World War II. He had played a supporting role in those attacks, running statistical analysis for Gen. Curtis E. LeMay of the Army’s Air Forces.

“We burned to death 100,000 Japanese civilians in Tokyo — men, women and children,” Mr. McNamara recalled; some 900,000 Japanese civilians died in all. “LeMay said, ‘If we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.’ And I think he’s right. He — and I’d say I — were behaving as war criminals.”

“What makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?” he asked. He found the question impossible to answer.

From Detroit to Washington

The idea of the United States losing a war seemed impossible when Mr. McNamara came to the Pentagon in January 1961 as the nation’s eighth defense secretary. He was 44 and had been named president of the Ford Motor Company only 10 weeks before. He later said, half-seriously, that he could barely tell a nuclear warhead from a station wagon when he arrived in Washington.

“Mr. President, it’s absurd, I’m not qualified,” he remembered protesting when asked to serve. He said that Kennedy had replied, “Look, Bob, I don’t think there’s any school for presidents, either.”

Kennedy called him the smartest man he had ever met. Mr. McNamara looked steely-eyed and supremely rational behind his wire-rimmed glasses, his brown hair slicked back precisely and crisply parted on top. Mr. McNamara had risen by his mastery of systems analysis, the business of making sense of large organizations — taking on a big problem, studying every facet, finding simplicity in the complexity.

His first mission was to defuse the myth of the missile gap. Kennedy had argued in his 1960 presidential campaign that the strategic nuclear arsenal of the United States was less powerful than the Soviet Union’s, and that the gap was growing. His predecessor as president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, called the missile gap a fiction in his final State of the Union address, on Jan. 12, 1961.

Mr. McNamara took office nine days later. He recalled that “my first responsibility as secretary of defense was to determine the degree of the gap and initiate action to close it.”

“It took us about three weeks to determine, yes, there was a gap,” he told an oral historian at his alma mater, the University of California at Berkeley. “But the gap was in our favor. It was a totally erroneous charge that Eisenhower had allowed the Soviets to develop a superior missile force.”

The problem was a lack of accurate intelligence; the estimate of Soviet forces had been a product of politics and guesswork.

By year’s end, new American spy satellites had determined that the Soviets had as few as 10 launchers from which missiles could be fired at the United States, while the United States could strike with more than 3,200 nuclear weapons.

At the same time, Mr. McNamara was enmeshed in plans for the Bay of Pigs invasion, in which some 1,500 Cubans, trained and equipped by the Central Intelligence Agency, were badly defeated by Fidel Castro’s forces in a bloody battle in April 1961. Mr. McNamara doubted that the C.I.A.’s Cubans could overthrow Mr. Castro, who had taken power in 1959, but he asked few questions beforehand and gave his go-ahead to the plan, which had been conceived under the Eisenhower administration.

Kennedy’s first order to Mr. McNamara after the invasion collapsed was to develop a proposal for overthrowing Cuba with American military force. Ten days later, he submitted a plan of attack that included 60,000 American troops, excluding naval and air forces. The plan proved impossible to fulfill. One lesson of the Bay of Pigs, Mr. McNamara told the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was that “the government should never start anything unless it could be finished, or the government was willing to face the consequences of failure,” according to the State Department’s official record of American foreign policy, “The Foreign Relations of the United States.”

At a White House meeting on Nov. 3, 1961, Kennedy authorized a program designed to undermine the Castro government, code-named Operation Mongoose. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy’s handwritten notes on the meeting say that Mr. McNamara was assigned to survey the situation and help him devise ways “to stir things up on island with espionage, sabotage, general disorder.” This operation also failed.

By 1962, the White House and the Pentagon had devised a new strategy of counterinsurgency to combat what Mr. McNamara called the tactics of “terror, extortion and assassination” by communist guerrillas. The call led to the creation of American special forces like the Green Berets and secret paramilitary operations throughout Asia and Latin America.

“Counterinsurgency became an almost ridiculous battle cry,” said Robert Amory, who in 1962 stepped down after nine years as the C.I.A.’s deputy director of intelligence to become the White House budget officer for classified programs.

While the United States flailed at Cuba, the Soviet Union decided, in the words of its leader, Nikita S. Khrushchev, “to throw a hedgehog at Uncle Sam’s pants.” It began sending nuclear missiles to Cuba, establishing a direct threat that evened up the balance of power with the United States, which had placed its own missiles near the Soviet border in Turkey.

At the height of the missile crisis, on Oct. 27, 1962, the Joint Chiefs of Staff recommended that Cuba be invaded within 36 hours. As the secret White House taping system installed by Kennedy recorded his words, Mr. McNamara laid out the prospects for war.

“The military plan is basically invasion,” he said. “When we attack Cuba, we are going to have to attack with an all-out attack.”

He continued, “The Soviet Union may, and, I think, probably will, attack the Turkish missiles.” The United States would then have to attack Soviet ships or bases in the Black Sea, he said. The chances of an uncontrolled escalation were high.

“And I would say that it is damn dangerous,” he said. “Now, I’m not sure we can avoid anything like that if we attack Cuba. But I think we should make every effort to avoid it. And one way to avoid it is to defuse the Turkish missiles before we attack Cuba.”

That idea — a secret deal in which Kennedy offered to withdraw his missiles in Turkey if Khrushchev removed his warheads from Cuba — resolved the crisis. “In the end, we lucked out — it was luck that prevented nuclear war,” Mr. McNamara said in “The Fog of War,” 40 years after the fact.

Mr. McNamara spent countless hours as secretary of defense trying to fine-tune American plans for nuclear war, turning what had been a hair-trigger, all-or-nothing strategy into a series of more limited options. The underlying principle of nuclear deterrence became known as “mutual assured destruction” — meaning that Washington and Moscow each knew it could destroy the other even if the other struck first.

In retirement, Mr. McNamara argued that planning for nuclear war was futile. “Nuclear weapons serve no military purposes whatsoever,” he wrote. “They are totally useless — except only to deter one’s opponent from using them.”

He had come close to that conclusion after the Cuban missile crisis. “In wars prior to the advent of nuclear weapons, damage was reparable and victory attainable,” Mr. McNamara said on Dec. 14, 1962, in a speech to NATO foreign ministers in Paris. “But after a full nuclear exchange such as the Soviet bloc and the NATO alliance are now able to carry out, the fatalities might well exceed 150 million.”

“The devastation would be complete and victory a meaningless term,” he said.

Remaking the Pentagon

“This place is a jungle, a jungle,” Mr. McNamara said after a few weeks at his desk at the Pentagon. He sent teams of bright young civilians — the whiz kids, as they were known — out across the Pentagon to tame it.

They set out to make sense of a cacophony of war strategies, weapons systems and budgets among the Army, the Navy and the Air Force. The office of the secretary of defense had been established in 1947 for precisely that purpose, but the task had defeated everyone who held the job before Mr. McNamara. He applied the tools of systems analysis and succeeded in clearing some swaths through the jungle. But he alienated key members of Congress and military commanders in battles over choosing weapons and closing bases.

The Pentagon consumed nearly half the national budget when he took office. He had 3.5 million employees — including 2.5 million in uniform, a number that increased by a million during his tenure. He said his goal was “to bring efficiency to a $40 billion enterprise beset by jealousies and political pressures.”

Under Mr. McNamara, the Pentagon’s budget increased to $74.9 billion in fiscal 1968, from $48.4 billion in 1962. The 1968 figure is equal to $457 billion in today’s dollars.

That was largely the cost of the war that erupted in Southeast Asia.

“Every quantitative measurement we have shows we are winning this war,” Mr. McNamara said after returning from his first trip to South Vietnam in April 1962. His statistical analysis showed that the military mission could be wrapped up in three or four years.

After Kennedy was assassinated on Nov. 22, 1963, Mr. McNamara found that Johnson depended on him to win the war, which became a full-fledged conflict for the United States the following year. The new president thought so highly of Mr. McNamara that he asked him to be his running mate in 1964.

“I said no,” Mr. McNamara recounted in his Berkeley oral history. “You shouldn’t start your elective career running for the vice presidency.” (Johnson chose Senator Hubert H. Humphrey of Minnesota.)

Johnson relied on Mr. McNamara in other sensitive matters, including negotiations over weapons sales to Israel and the full integration of the armed services, the reserves and the National Guard after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. When Johnson, early in his presidency, announced he wanted to keep the federal budget below $100 billion, Mr. McNamara ordered weapons programs canceled and military bases closed in a matter of days

But by the fall of 1964, Vietnam was the all-consuming obsession.

Congress authorized the war after Johnson contended that American warships had been attacked by North Vietnamese patrol boats in the Gulf of Tonkin on Aug. 4, 1964. The attack never happened, as a report declassified by the National Security Agency in 2005 made clear. The American ships had been firing at their own sonar shadows on a dark night.

At the time, however, the agency’s experts in signals intelligence, or sigint, told Mr. McNamara that the evidence of an attack was iron-clad. “McNamara had taken over raw sigint and shown the president what they thought was evidence,” said Ray Cline, then the C.I.A.’s deputy director of intelligence. He added, “It was just what Johnson was looking for.”

Nor was this the only case of faulty intelligence underlying American military action under Mr. McNamara. In April 1965, Johnson ordered 24,000 American troops to the Dominican Republic after a revolt against the government; it was the first large-scale American landing in Latin America since 1928.

In public, Mr. McNamara said the deployment had showed the “readiness and capabilities of the U.S. defense establishment to support our foreign policy.” In private, he voiced dismay. The C.I.A. had told the White House and the Pentagon that the rebels were controlled by Cuban revolutionaries. But Mr. McNamara had deep doubts.

“You don’t think C.I.A. can document it?” Johnson asked him, according to tapes of White House telephone conversations recorded on April 30, 1965.

“I don’t think so, Mr. President,” McNamara replied. “I just don’t believe the story.”

Johnson nonetheless insisted in a speech to the American people that he would not allow “Communist conspirators” to establish “another Communist government in the Western Hemisphere.” This led some newspapers to assert that the president and the Pentagon had a “credibility gap.” The phrase stuck when applied to Vietnam.

Turning on Vietnam

In 1965, tens of thousands of American combat troops were arriving in Vietnam and American warplanes were pounding the enemy in a bombing campaign codenamed Rolling Thunder, which sent 55,000 flights with 33,000 tons of bombs over North Vietnam; the next year, it was 148,000 flights with 128,000 tons. The number of aircraft lost went from 171 in 1965 to 318 the next year; the costs soared to $1.2 billion, from $460 million.

Rolling Thunder never stopped the flow of enemy arms and soldiers into South Vietnam.

When Mr. McNamara held a rare private briefing for reporters in Honolulu in February 1966, he no longer possessed the radiant confidence he had always displayed in public. Mr. McNamara said with conviction, “No amount of bombing can end the war.”

By 1966, Mr. McNamara was planning to build an electronic barrier across the demilitarized zone that separated North and South Vietnam. Soldiers called it the McNamara Line, after the Maginot Line, a futile French defense against Germany built before World War II. The barrier proved to be worthless.

On Aug. 26, 1966, Mr. McNamara read a book-length C.I.A. study called “The Vietnamese Communists’ Will to Persist,” which concluded that nothing the United States was doing could defeat the enemy. He called in a C.I.A. analyst, George Allen, who had spent 17 years working on the question of Vietnam.

“He wanted to know what I would do if I were sitting in his place,” Mr. Allen wrote in his 2001 memoir of Vietnam, “None So Blind.” “I decided to respond candidly.”

“Stop the buildup of American forces,” he said he told Mr. McNamara. “Halt the bombing of the North, and negotiate a cease-fire with Hanoi.”

After that moment of truth, Mr. McNamara told his aides to begin compiling a top-secret history of the war — later known as the Pentagon Papers — and he began asking himself what the United States was doing in Vietnam. Many Americans were asking the same, giving rise to a growing antiwar movement that even Mr. McNamara’s own son participated in as a student protester at Stanford.

On Sept. 19, 1966, Mr. McNamara telephoned Johnson.

“I myself am more and more convinced that we ought definitely to plan on termination of bombing in the North,” Mr. McNamara, said according White House tapes. He also suggested establishing a ceiling on the number of troops to be sent to Vietnam. “I don’t think we ought to just look ahead to the future and say we’re going to go higher and higher and higher and higher — six hundred thousand, seven hundred thousand, whatever it takes.”

The president’s only response was an unintelligible grunt.

Departure and Guilt

The turning point came on May 19, 1967, when Mr. McNamara sent a long and carefully argued paper to Johnson, urging him to negotiate a peace rather than escalate the war.

The war, the paper began, “is becoming increasingly unpopular as it escalates — causing more American casualties, more fear of its growing into a wider war, more privation of the domestic sector, and more distress at the amount of suffering being visited on the noncombatants in Vietnam, South and North.”

“Most Americans,” Mr. McNamara continued, “are convinced that somehow we should not have gotten this deeply in. All want the war ended and expect their president to end it. Successfully. Or else.”

That was the last straw for Johnson, who came to believe that Mr. McNamara was secretly plotting to help Robert F. Kennedy, then a Democratic senator from New York, run on a peace ticket in the 1968 election. The president announced on Nov. 29, 1967, that Mr. McNamara would give up his defense post to run the World Bank. Mr. McNamara left the Pentagon two months later, never comprehending, in his words, “whether I quit or was fired.” It was clearly the latter.

Mr. McNamara had sought to transform the armed services. But his often aloof and occasionally arrogant conduct left him with few allies inside the Pentagon when the war began to go wrong. At a going-away luncheon given by Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Mr. McNamara wept as he spoke of the futility of the air war in Vietnam. Many of his colleagues were appalled as he condemned the bombing, aghast at the weight of his guilt.

He had thought for a long time that the United States could not win the war. In retirement, he listed reasons: a failure to understand the enemy, a failure to see the limits of high-tech weapons, a failure to tell the truth to the American people, and a failure to grasp the nature of the threat of communism.

“What went wrong was a basic misunderstanding or misevaluation of the threat to our security represented by the North Vietnamese,” he said in his Berkeley oral history. “It led President Eisenhower in 1954 to say that if Vietnam were lost, or if Laos and Vietnam were lost, the dominoes would fall.”

He continued: “I am certain we exaggerated the threat. Had we never intervened, I now doubt that the dominoes would have fallen.”

“We didn’t know our opposition,” he said. “We didn’t understand the Chinese, we didn’t understand the Vietnamese, particularly the North Vietnamese. So the first lesson is know your opponents. I want to suggest to you that we don’t know our potential opponents today.”

An Analytical Mind

Robert Strange McNamara — Strange was his mother’s maiden name — was born June 9, 1916, in San Francisco to Robert and Clara Nell McNamara. His father, the son of Irish immigrants, managed a wholesale shoe company.

“My earliest memory is of a city exploding with joy,” he said in “The Fog of War.” It was Nov. 11, 1918 — the end of World War I. He remembered the tops of the streetcars crowded with people cheering and kissing.

In 1937, Mr. McNamara graduated with honors in economics from the University of California at Berkeley, where he also studied philosophy. After two years at Harvard Business School, he spent a year with Price, Waterhouse & Company, the accounting firm. He returned to Harvard in 1940 as an assistant professor of business administration.

That year, he married his college sweetheart, Margaret Craig. She created Reading Is Fundamental, a literacy program for poor children, while he was at the Pentagon. By the time she died in 1981, the program served three million children. Mr. McNamara and his second wife, the former Diana Masieri Byfield, were married in 2004 in San Francisco.

Besides his wife, Mr. McNamara is survived by his son, Robert Craig, of Winters, Calif.; two daughters, Margaret Elizabeth Pastor and Kathleen McNamara, both of Washington, and six grandchildren.

When World War II came, Mr. McNamara taught young air officers the statistical methods he had learned at Harvard, with the aim of orchestrating the air war in Europe by determining how many planes could fly each day in every theater. He served in England, then India, and held the rank of lieutenant colonel at war’s end in 1945.

“After the war, my wife and I both came down with polio, if you can imagine, infantile paralysis,” Mr. McNamara remembered in his memoir. “My case was relatively light; I was out of the hospital in a couple of months. But she was in the hospital for nine months, and they thought she’d never lift an arm or a leg off the bed again.”

Unable to pay the hospital bills on a Harvard salary, he accepted a job offer from the Ford Motor Company.

He and nine other air-war statisticians, none older than 30, were hired by Henry Ford II to reorganize a mismanaged company. “He wanted some individuals who he could feel were his men, if you will, because the company was staffed with old-line executives who had been associated with his father and grandfather,” Mr. McNamara recalled.

The company lost $85 million in the first eight months after Mr. McNamara’s arrival, the equivalent of about $925 million adjusted for inflation today. But Mr. McNamara and his young team turned Ford around. He rose swiftly — comptroller, general manager of the Ford division, vice president for all car and truck divisions.

In November 1960, one day after John F. Kennedy’s election, Mr. McNamara was named president of the company, the No. 2 position under Mr. Ford, who was chairman and chief executive. Five weeks later, Kennedy asked him to run the Pentagon.

The World Bank Years

Mr. McNamara’s time at the Pentagon came close to breaking his spirit. But he immediately followed that ordeal with 13 years as president of the World Bank. He set out to expand the bank’s power and to attack global poverty. He succeeded in part, but with unintended consequences.

The industrialized nations created the bank at the end of World War II to help rebuild Western Europe, but it later expanded its membership and shifted its focus to lending in the third world to increase economic growth and forestall war. In 1973 Mr. McNamara dedicated himself to the reduction of what he called “absolute poverty — utter degradation” in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

As he had done at the Pentagon and Ford, Mr. McNamara sought to remake the bank. When he arrived on April 1, 1968, the bank was lending about $1 billion a year. That figure grew until it stood at $12 billion when he left in 1981. By that time the bank oversaw some 1,600 projects valued at $100 billion in 100 nations, including hydroelectric dams, superhighways and steel factories.

The ecological effects of these developments had not been taken into account, however. In some cases corruption in the governments that the bank aimed to help undid its good intentions. Many poor nations, overwhelmed by their debts to the bank, were not able to repay loans.

The costs of Mr. McNamara’s work thus sometimes outweighed the benefits, and that led to a concerted political attack on the bank itself during the 1980s.

Mr. McNamara saw some of these problems as they developed and shifted the emphasis of the bank’s lending toward smaller projects — irrigation, seeds and fertilizer, paving farm-to-market roads. But progress was often hard to measure. At the end of his tenure, the bank estimated that the world’s poorest numbered 800 million, an increase of 200 million over the decade.

Public Contrition

Mr. McNamara left the bank when he turned 65, after his wife died, and for a time he tried to unwind and get away, taking a 140-mile hike up to the 18,000-foot level of Mount Everest. But within two years, he began to speak out against the nuclear arms race. In 1995, 14 years after leaving public life, he published his denunciation of the Vietnam War and his role in it, “In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam,” (Times Books/Random House) for which he was denounced in turn.

Unlike any other secretary of defense, Mr. McNamara struggled in public with the morality of war and the uses of American power.

“We are the strongest nation in the world today,” he said in “The Fog of War,” released at the time of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. “I do not believe that we should ever apply that economic, political, and military power unilaterally. If we had followed that rule in Vietnam, we wouldn’t have been there. None of our allies supported us. Not Japan, not Germany, not Britain or France. If we can’t persuade nations with comparable values of the merit of our cause, we’d better re-examine our reasoning.”

“War is so complex it’s beyond the ability of the human mind to comprehend,” Mr. McNamara concluded. “Our judgment, our understanding, are not adequate. And we kill people unnecessarily.”

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