---
title: "David Gale"
type: "entity"
entity_kind: "person"
status: "hub"
canonical_name: "David Gale"
aliases: []
first_seen: "2026-07-12T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
connects_to: ["Brouwer fixed-point theorem","Hex (game)","topological combinatorics","John Stallings","Michael Todd"]
seek_code_commit: "17d9798"
---


American mathematician and economist (Ph.D. Princeton 1949; taught at Brown
1950–1966, then professor of mathematics, economics, and operations
research at Berkeley from 1966) working across game theory, linear
programming, and mathematical economics — co-creator, with Lloyd Shapley,
of the Gale–Shapley stable-matching algorithm. In this vault he is the
author of the 1979 *American Mathematical Monthly* paper proving the
board game Hex's no-draw property mathematically equivalent to the Brouwer
fixed-point theorem, a paper whose own introduction credits the finding as
much to folklore and two colleagues (John Stallings, Michael Todd) as to
Gale himself.

## References
- [[claim-gale-1979-hex-draw-impossibility-equivalent-to-brouwer-fixed-point]] · [[claim-gale-1979-hex-implies-brouwer-via-covering-argument]] · [[claim-gale-1979-brouwer-implies-hex-credited-to-stallings-todd]]
- Capture: 10-inbox/raw/2026-08-03-pull-the-exact-quoted-sentence-from-gales-1979.md

## Updates
- 2026-08-22: Nash's own 1952 RAND report and Ryan Hayward's research-group page place Gale in a much earlier role than his 1979 Brouwer paper — one of the two people (with Nash) credited with introducing Hex to the Princeton game theory group in 1948, thirty-one years before his topological-equivalence proof. ([[claim-nash-1952-princeton-circle-includes-gale-milnor-enderton]])