Donald G. Saari

He was editor in chief of the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society from 1998 to 2005, and published a book on the early history of the journal.

Saari is also known for having some discussion with Theodore J. Kaczynski in 1978, prior to the mail bombings that led to Kaczynski's 1996 arrest.

After taking a temporary position at Yale University, he was hired at Northwestern University by Ralph P. Boas Jr., who had also been doing similar work in celestial mechanics. From 1968 to 2000, he served as assistant, associate, and full professor of mathematics at Northwestern, and eventually became Pancoe Professor of Mathematics there. He was led to mathematical economics by discovering the high caliber of the economics students enrolling in his courses in functional analysis, and added a second position as Professor of Economics. He then moved to the University of California, Irvine at the invitation of R. Duncan Luce, who had founded the Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences (IMBS) in the UCI School of Social Sciences in 1989. At UC Irvine, he took over the directorship of the IMBS in 2003, and stepped down as director in 2017. He is a trustee of the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute.

He received his Bachelor of Science in Mathematics in 1962 from Michigan Tech, and his Master of Science and PhD in Mathematics from Purdue University in 1964 and 1967, respectively. At Purdue, he began working with his doctoral advisor, Harry Pollard, because of a shared interest in pedagogy, but soon picked up Pollard's interests in celestial mechanics and wrote his doctoral dissertation on the n-body problem.

Donald Gene Saari (born March 1940) is an American mathematician, a Distinguished Professor of Mathematics and Economics and former director of the Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. His research interests include the n-body problem, the Borda count voting system, and application of mathematics to the social sciences.