Dr. Gerald Thomas, adjunct professor in the Diercks School of Advanced Computing at MSOE, received the Wolfram Innovator Award for his work integrating particle physics and deterministic decision theory.

The Wolfram Innovator Awards recognize leaders who do not just adopt computation tools but actively expand their limits to drive meaningful global change. Their dedicated work across science, engineering and education continues to inspire.

Thomas has a 25-year corporate career spanning software engineering, project management and executive leadership at Bell Labs, Motorola and a successful start-up. He also spent a decade researching high-energy physics with CERN, the University of Helsinki and Argonne National Laboratory. While collaborating with MIT-trained system dynamics consultants to address project delivery overruns, he developed the insight that a deterministic theory of decisions could be grounded in theoretical physics.

Through his unique combination of corporate experience and particle physics research, Thomas formalized his decision-making frameworks. “The idea of making decisions is well known from simple games like chess or rock-paper-scissors. What is amazing is that the basic ideas carry over into real-world decisions, such as whether to keep my date to play tennis this Saturday or skip it because I got a better offer. What is new in my work is how to formalize what to do when the game is played repetitively. How does what I have learned carry over into making the next decision?”

Thomas’ decision-making frameworks concepts are expanded in his book, Geometry, Language and Strategy: The Dynamics of Decision Processes, volume 2 (World Scientific, 2016), which applies principles from physics and mathematics to human endeavor and strategic decision-making. He further expanded on these ideas with the two-volume Wolfram Media notebooks, A Field Theory of Games: Introduction to Decision Process Engineering, 2021 and 2023, that provide a practical toolkit that can be used for the field theory of games computations.

“The genesis of these last two volumes was based on my trying to teach these ideas to MSOE students,” explained Thomas. “I followed this up with a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) done with the Wolfram team that is now up and running on their website.”

Thomas was honored to be recognized for his work by Wolfram. “[It felt] pretty amazing that anybody noticed what started out as fairly esoteric research on game theory and physics,” said Thomas.

Thomas has been an adjunct professor at MSOE since 2005. He is the Swiss army knife of professors, teaching courses across electrical engineering, computer engineering, software engineering and computer science. This includes courses such as Circuits, Antennas, C++ Programming, Electromagnetic Theory, Java and Algorithms, and Software Design. He has also taught courses on game theory, which featured lessons from his book, Geometry, Language and Strategy: The Dynamics of Decision Processes.

Outside of MSOE, Thomas is currently working with a mathematician on black holes and the theory of quantum gravity. They “make extensive use of AI to find out what has been done in the literature.”