A native of Terre Haute, Indiana, Stuart E. Dreyfus is professor emeritus at University of California, Berkeley in the Industrial Engineering and Operations Research Department.
[1][2] While at Rand he coauthored Applied Dynamic Programming with Richard Bellman.
Following that work, he was encouraged to pursue a Ph.D. which he completed in applied mathematics at Harvard University in 1964, on the calculus of variations.
In 1962, Dreyfus simplified the Dynamic Programming-based derivation of backpropagation (due to Henry J. Kelley and Arthur E. Bryson) using only the chain rule.
[3][4][5][6] He also coauthored Mind Over Machine with his brother Hubert Dreyfus in 1986.