William C. Davidon

I think it was something like September or October.

In September or October of 1970, John and Bonnie Raines got a phone call from a friend, a man by the name of Bill Davidon.

Bill was a Navy veteran, a physicist, a father of two.

He was an unassuming man, calm, thoughtful, and deeply practical.

John and Bonnie had the nagging feeling that America was becoming one.

But they had no way of knowing for sure.

That is, until they got a call from Bill Davidon inviting them to a party.

The scariest part of Halloween isn't the full moon or a chainsaw starting up in the distance.

And so I don't know who told me about this new method of Davidoff.

Bill Davidon, right? Bill Davidon, William C.

Davidon, which was called a variable metric method for minimization.

And I had the report.

It was an atomic energy report.

And then, you know, you're doing a direct kind of descent method, and if you're willing to constrain problems, you go along in some face of the polyhedron that you're in, and then you hit a new constraint that if you move beyond it you're going to be you're going to be outside of it and therefore infeasible so you add it to your manifold and then what do you do when when you get near optimality in a particular manifold you got to drop some constraint to allow yourself to go interior into a higher dimensional space and so i knew you had to do something with projection so i i developed what was equivalent to a positive definite projection He's not an orthogonal projection, a weighted projection.

And I worked these things out.

Oh, so then I had discovered by then, by the beginning of the year, this was in 1965, Fletcher and Powell had written a paper, you know, basically putting the mathematics, some of the mathematics behind the DFP method, behind Davidon's result.

Additional thanks to director Joanna Hamilton for letting us use some of the original interviews from her incredible documentary, 1971.

Finally, our deepest gratitude to the courageous Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI, Bill Davidon, Ralph Daniel, Judy Feingold, Keith Forsyth, Bonnie Raines, John Raines, Sarah Schumer, and Bob Williamson.

Honestly,

honestly,