Gardiner L. Tucker

Gardiner Luttrell Tucker (1925 – November 2021) was an American scientist and former government official. He was the former director of IBM Research and was Assistant Secretary of Defense for Systems Analysis in the Nixon administration. He also served as Assistant Secretary General of NATO.

Biography Tucker was born in 1925 in New York City.

Tucker graduated from the Birch Wathen School in 1943, and from Columbia College in 1947, Phi Beta Kappa, with special distinction in mathematics and physics. In 1953, he received his PhD from Columbia University, where he studied with Isidor Isaac Rabi. He was also a member of the Sigma Xi honor society.

In 1954, he was promoted to physicist in charge of semiconductor research at Poughkeepsie, New York. He also started research into field effective transistors and related areas such as processing techniques, chemistry, lithography, and circuit design, laying the groundwork for IBM's mainframe memories.

From 1976 to 1985, Tucker was vice president for Science and Technology for International Paper. He also served as a director of Motorola and was the chairman of the technology committee and a member of the executive and audit committees.

Tucker died in November 2021.