Short answers, pulled from the story.
Stuart E. Dreyfus is an American industrial engineer, control theorist, and mathematician, currently professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He is known for co-authoring Applied Dynamic Programming with Richard Bellman, for simplifying the derivation of backpropagation using the chain rule in 1962, and for co-writing Mind Over Machine with his brother Hubert Dreyfus in 1986.
In 1962, Dreyfus simplified the Dynamic Programming-based derivation of backpropagation, which had originally been developed by Henry J. Kelley and Arthur E. Bryson. He achieved this simplification using only the chain rule, making the underlying mathematics more transparent.
Stuart Dreyfus completed a Ph.D. in applied mathematics at Harvard University in 1964, with his doctoral work focused on the calculus of variations.
At the RAND Corporation, Dreyfus was a programmer of the JOHNNIAC computer. It was during his time at RAND that he co-authored Applied Dynamic Programming with Richard Bellman.
Mind Over Machine was co-authored by Stuart Dreyfus and his brother Hubert Dreyfus, published in 1986. The book examines human skill acquisition, arguing that expert performance relies on intuition rather than explicit rule-following, in contrast to the approach underlying many artificial intelligence systems of that era.
Stuart E. Dreyfus is professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, in the Industrial Engineering and Operations Research Department.