I was born in Superior, Wisconsin on September 27, 1932 as the second child of Scott and Lucille Williamson. Both of my parents had been high school teachers but my father left teaching when he married my mother and joined my grandfather, Oliver E. Dunn, in the family real estate business. My father was a successful small businessman and active participant in the life of the community, culminating with nine years of service as President of the Superior City Council. My mother had been the principal of the small high school in Minnesota where my parents met. The prevailing rule on married women required that my mother retire from teaching, but her knowledge of the subject matter was undiminished. Her recall of Latin after 20 years was such that she could have resumed teaching where she left off on a moment's notice.

I attended the public schools in Superior. This was a very egalitarian experience. Superior is the most democratic community I have ever lived in. Talent took many forms and was respected in all.

I was a good student, a mediocre athlete, and had many good high school friends I hung out with – attended Saturday night dances, went bowling, played basketball and pool, and, especially, played Friday night poker. Many of them remain close friends to this day.

My university teacher and mentor Kenneth Arrow remembers me as a student who asked good questions. Although I had not previously thought of myself in that way, on reflection I think that Arrow was right. I was forever curious about how things worked (or didn't work), which led me to identify lapses or anomalies and/or to push the logic to completion. Such an orientation would serve me well throughout my academic career.

My initial thoughts of becoming a lawyer changed in high school as I became more attracted to math and science and began talking about being an engineer. My mother declared that M.I.T. was the place to go and, with the advice of the physics teacher at the local college, I enrolled in Ripon College, which had a combined plan with M.I.T.

That combination worked out well. My first jobs after graduation in 1955 were as a project engineer for G.E. and later with the U.S. government in Washington, D.C., where I met and married my wife, Dolores Celini. I applied to and was accepted into the Ph.D. program at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford, where I enrolled in 1958. To my surprise and delight, I discovered that much of my engineering training in mathematics and statistics and model building carried over. But there was more to it than that. My engineering training gave me a much more grounded foundation than would most undergraduate programs in any of the social sciences.

Business Professor