 My pleasure to welcome you all here to the Ford School and here to celebrate Bob Axelrod's amazing career and amazing life. Bob is, I guess, officially retired. He is the William Hamilton Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of the University of Michigan. Those of you who know Bob will know that retirement has not really changed very much. Your job is daily life. Just back from China, in the middle of negotiating a new set of arrangements for the Chinese to work on cybersecurity, writing, mentoring our students. And so it's wonderful to be able to celebrate a retirement of an individual who is going to remain deeply embedded and engaged in our community for many, many years. So I'm thrilled to be able to celebrate with Bob and with all of you this evening. We have an amazing lineup of speakers. We're going to talk a lot about Bob's life. I want to give a special welcome back to Bob Putnam, to the University of Michigan and to Ann Arbor, and all of our, thank all of our wonderful speakers for their work. Those of you who know a little bit about Bob know that he's a genius. He was told that among others by the MacArthur Fellowship. He is the recipient of the National Science Award, delivered by President Obama. But more than that, he's a caring and wonderful and engaging and thoughtful member of our community. And so I want to begin our evening while you still have a little wine in your glasses while the life says to you about me. And now let me turn things over to our master of ceremonies, Paul Crocker. Thank you, Michael. It's great to see you all here. We are changing the order of the program because, you know, we're optimizers here. And we looked at the program, we printed it, we evaluated it, and said, nah, we're going to make it slightly different. We'll let that evolve as we go. As Bob said, I'll be master of ceremonies. I have the privilege of introducing, moderating, and pacing celebratory remarks by a number of Bob's colleagues and friends. In this case, actually, I think each of our speakers is both colleague and friend. And I include myself in that group as well. Before we get to those remarks, I do want to take a moment to remember Michael Cullen, a friend and colleague and more who died several years ago and who would surely be on this program if he were alive. And we wouldn't know what he would say because you never knew in advance what Michael was going to say. It's impossible to imagine the development of the Ford School and the School of Information and the influence that Bob has had on scholarship and policy without seeing and hearing Michael as he helped everyone around him be smarter and better and kinder. So we miss him. But he's part of the story still. I asked Bob if there was anything in particular that I should attend to from the lectern. He was very clear. He said I should introduce people and make sure that they don't talk for very long. So except for Bob Putnam, who came a long way to be here and therefore gets a longer time to talk. I'm going to hold people to about three minutes and they all say no problem. You know these people. We'll see how that works out. Notwithstanding that each topic that the speakers will address talking about Bob could form the basis of a long symposium or a long book or a full semester course followed by another full semester course. So I will endeavor to take a little less than three minutes. We will change up the order. Following me, Nancy Burns, Chair of Political Science will speak. Then Jim Morrill, a Political Science Professor. Then Carl Simon. And then Scott Page. Is that what you guys have agreed? Are you stuck? Is that stable now for half a day? OK, that's good. We reserved the right decision. I understand that. So all of those worthy will speak about aspects of Bob's work and its impact. And I want to note a few things, too. So claiming the privilege of the lecture. One is that Bob's work repeatedly comes back to the goal of a peaceful or at least more peaceful society, one of reduced conflict. He is exemplary in his ability to use sophisticated methods and his own sophisticated mind to bring science to policy, making sure that he gets the science right, enabling him to get the policy right. This combination of methods and skills has enabled him to develop and use a well-deserved reputation as an honest broker. He understands conflict in ways that allow him to learn from and to teach people who are engaged with conflict, real conflict, in the real world. He's a nice guy, to be sure. But his diplomatic and scientific capability derives not from the fact that he's a nice guy, but from skill and integrity. And it's exemplary of what we would like science in the service of policy to be. Michael talked about Bob's talk yesterday about cybersecurity. It was terrifying. So during the reception, if you want to be terrified, ask Bob to talk to you about those issues. I've known Bob as a friend and colleague since he came to Michigan, about a year after I did. And it was my pleasure on several occasions to negotiate agreements with him that were designed to keep him at Michigan and keep him happy and not bankrupt the organization. Exactly so. There were times when I would ask myself just how could I have gotten to a situation where my job description included bargaining with Bob Axelrod in a zero-sum game. It turned out to help a lot that the game was never quite zero-sum because Bob always wanted to make the place around him better as well as to make his world work well. Indeed, he thought that the place around him was part of his world and he paid a great deal of attention to it. It's striking that with his very successful career and very public career in many ways, if you look through his very long CV, you don't find chair, associate chair, dean, associate dean, provost. You don't find any of those titles there. Instead, the University of Michigan and Bob both figured out that his comparative advantage was in scholarship. Scholarship is what he did and both the University and Bob, and I would say the world, have benefited accordingly. So now, next, Nancy Burns. So I am really thrilled to get to say a few words about Bob. For those of you who know me, you know that I like data. So I went back and read Bob's annual reports from the beginning. Part of the fun of that was seeing the meteoric path of his career through the late 1970s, not in retrospect, but while it was happening each year. Oh my. Jim and Scott and Carl and Bob will, I'm sure, talk about the crazy and inventive power of the ideas that were that path. And by 1978, at least reading my data, you could see the future. You could see the ways that Bob's ideas would shape the world. But what I want to call out is something else, something that echoes part of what Paul talked about. And that is the character of his local citizenship through his nearly 50 years at Michigan. Bob's citizenship, for those of you who've been in a department meeting, in a committee meeting with him, no, that has been marked by worrying over frameworks for thinking through whatever issues or decisions have been facing, whatever body is at hand. And so I'm gonna speak on behalf of the department. A hiring decision, a tenure case, some crazy issue that came out of nowhere, whether it was in a faculty meeting, one of his many terms on the department's executive committee as admissions director, Bob always arrived with a plan. He had a framework to put on the table, an agenda setting framework, one that he had worked out and worried over in the fine grain, and then had sketched on a very tiny piece of paper that care and engagement represented in those decades of tiny pieces of paper. About every important thing that we have done as a department shaped the place. It shaped the character of our decisions, and it set a model for those who are just joining the department. And we are tremendously fortunate in this, fortunate in your time in the department, fortunate for the decades of tiny pieces of paper. And so I just wanna thank you and say that I'm honored to have been your colleague. Thank you, Paul. So when I fast through this, I wanted to come up with a relatively simple, direct, quite important observation on Bob's career. Most of us work on well-defined and accepted questions, aiding the accumulation of knowledge through the accretion of results and insights. One of the hallmarks of Bob's career is his ability to write the first paper rather than another paper. Using simple but elegant mathematics to lay out the essence of a problem that was ill-defined and poorly understood before. Bob's recent paper in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on the Timing and Use of Cybervulnerabilities, for example, shows that the exploitation of such weapons is more complicated and contingent than is commonly believed. That paper shows that the persistence and stealth of a vulnerability, along with the distribution of the value of opportunities influences when a natural should use it. Contrary to the common wisdom of use them or lose them that argues for early use. Now, I actually wanna tell a personal story here that's related to another one of these papers. I don't think I've ever told you this one before, Bob. But another paper that's in this vein is The Rational Timing of Surprise, which was published in World Politics in 1979. It also happens to be the first time we met, although neither of us knew it at the time. In those days, all the reviews for World Politics were done in-house by the Princeton faculty. But then they got this paper and it had math in it. And so someone there sent it out to Bruce Kane, who was one of my advisors at the time at Caltech. And he sort of looked and said, oh, it's got math, give it to Moral. And so he gave it to me because I, like Bob, was a math major playing to get a PhD in political science. In fact, Bob did this 15 years before I did. And I read it and I thought the paper was pretty good. And if you ask my students, that's very high praise. And so about this way, we met remotely through the review process without even knowing it. And so here's to Bob, who writes the first paper on topics rather than just another paper. See, Aaron was gonna pass out some pictures, but we'll see him, oh good. Just throw them out so people can see him quickly. So I wanna talk a little more about Bob's work and how exciting it has been to be even close to it. My talk has four characters and the pictures you're about to see has those four characters in them. The four characters are Bill Hamilton. Bob is the William D. Hamilton professor. Bill, how do you describe Bill? I think Bob would agree with this. In the 1860s, there was Darwin. In the 1980s, there was Hamilton and everyone else's comes afterwards. Is that fair? I think that's fair. John Holland, John Holland and Marita Holland is here. John was the very first computer science PhD in Michigan. He invented something called the genetic algorithms and that really was a catalyst of many of the things that we did here. First computer science. First, in the world. Whoa, okay, thank you. Can you see from those pictures roughly who's who? The guy, and then Michael Cohen. We've mentioned Michael Cohen. Paul mentioned Michael. Michael was, in some ways, Bob may be other family closest friends, my other family closest friend and just incredibly great to work with. He was one of the co-founders of the School of Information here and played a big role. So those are the four characters and there are four on the left side of that picture. Both Exorod and Holland have MacArthur Genius Awards, for example. I told you what I thought of Hamilton. I just came back from an Oxford meeting about Hamilton's rule, which I must say was pretty impressive. So, my story starts around 1980, okay? In my two hours I have now only 40 years to cover, right? So nobody talked about the prisoner's dilemma. How can you talk about Bob Axelraub without mentioning the prisoner's dilemma, okay? I'll assume everyone knows about arms races and cooperation and defecting and that in a one-shot game, defecting is the only feasible strategy. And the question is, what if we had a, what if people played over and over again, a repeated prisoner's dilemma? No one had an idea of what the solution was and Bob's ingenious idea was, let's ask the experts. So we had tournament in which all the experts in game theory submitted their favorite strategies for solving repeated prisoner's dilemma oh, you know the story. The winner was the simplest, Annapol Rappaport's tit for tat, which was do unto your opponent what your opponent done did to you last time. This was a little too simple, Bob ran it again with the same, more sophisticated group and the same results, okay? And so this was, and most of this was beginning sort of focused on political science, Bob was really eager to understand how this might reflect biology and more of the biological. So he asked one of the participants, a guy named Richard Dawkins who's written a few books and Richard said, well, you had the very best person in the area down the street at the University of Michigan, check with Bill Hamilton. They did, the partnership was incredibly productive and exciting, I wish I was there. They're sort of two quiet people but I bet the room buzzed when they talk. They wrote a paper talking about whose title was The Emergence of Cooperation. It won the best picture, best paper in science in 1981, of the Cleveland Prize, and Bob later wrote a book based with the same title, which I brought and sitting there at my desk. Meanwhile, Michael and Michael Cohen and Bob are working together writing a paper on something economists couldn't dream of, preferences might change and adapt. And they at one point asked me to interact with them and look over their shoulders, which I did. We began a friendship. Meanwhile, this is all around 1981 and 82, Michael Cohen is sitting in John Holland's genetic algorithm course. So I'm gonna take 30 seconds for a lesson on genetic algorithms, okay Paul? You'll be unattested. So imagine you're teaching a computer how to play a game of chess, checkers, tic-tac-till and it's got a bunch of rules to follow and each rule says given this board situation here's what you do, okay? These are about sequences of zeros and ones and you could, for a game like tic-tac-till you can put every rule in but not through checkers or chess, okay? And so you could teach your computer but how do you, what rules are you gonna put in? Well, John figured out how to put sex into the story by having rules mate with each other in a sense. So every rule got some points every time it was part of a winning game and it would take the strongest rules and mate them with each other so that maybe the best parts of one would make, these are again strings of zeros and ones, okay? To form new rules which hopefully would be stronger. They weren't, they'd fall by the wayside if not they would make it a much better program. They also mutate every now and then and this genetic algorithm has sort of been one of the things that has been the focus of what I wanna talk to you about. Michael's excited. He talked to John Howland about getting together. Let's bring some of the ideas and the rules we may play. Michael brought his good friend Bob Axelrod. Howland brought his mentor Arthur Berks who was a co-inventor of the computer with John von Neumann and Howland's thesis advisor and the four of them got together every week, every two weeks actually. They named the group after their initials, BACH, the Bach Group and it was brainstorming heaven, okay? They felt at some point they needed to expand. Bob brought Bill Hamilton into the picture. They also brought John Howland's computer assistant and post-doc Rick Riala and I was brought in as sort of a math, you know, in-house math modeler. Those were, and we would still be together every two weeks for a few hours. Nobody ever missed, we wouldn't want to miss. It was so exciting. What did we do? Okay, we talked about sex. Of course. Yeah, well, that knows it. I got the hang of it, right? So the genetic algorithm, how to use, how to work with, we critique each other's books. Bob wrote two books at the time. John wrote three or four. Michael and Bob wrote Harnessing Complexities, still the best book on complex systems that had to exist. Most of these were dedicated to the Bach Group. In fact, John's book had a subtitle. How complexity, you know, how adaptation helps complexity. Okay, H, C, A, anyway, say C, A, B, whatever you got. Okay, anyway, we critique, and then we talked about the genetic algorithm. When does it work? When does it not work? And how can we make it a powerful tool? And so, I mean, in a course with two very short descriptions of the two projects that really took a lot of our time. Bob took the prisoner's dilemma and asked, what would the genetic algorithm do? Do, you know, here's a computer learning system. Could it, could it teach your computer to protect it? So you've got three who put in the rules for prisoner's dilemma. And so Bob put in a bunch of garbage rules, random rules about given what your opponent did this time and the last time, what you do next, okay? The, and then the rules evolved over time and there's not too many rules. The computer was playing to protect that. It worked on its own, okay? Bob, my vision of this is Bob went to have some champagne with Amy, okay? And when he came back, the computer had kept going and it figured out that he rules and took the test. On its own, okay? It figured out who was playing and what's the best strategy against that player. The last thing I want to mention is Bob's work with Bill Hamilton. Bill, and this is where sex really enters the picture. Bill had this wild idea. The question is, why is there sex? We all think about this all the time, right? That's all. There's a vision that takes two to make one. Some trees go through this horrible process, okay? Why is there sex? Hamilton's idea was it's parasite avoidance. Yeah, think about that next time. I don't know what to do with my notes. The idea was that there's an arms race going on between individuals and the parasite. And if you stood still, your body stood still, the parasite would figure out how to take advantage of that. So by mixing the gene pool, every coupling goes deep, okay? The parasite, we're taking on this, aren't we? A great idea, but is it right? Hamilton argued, well, look at the cardinals. Their bright red is assigned to show that they're parasite free. Look at the places where there are trees that are mono, whatever, okay? Don't have sex. Most of those trees are non-parasite areas. And so the great goal was to take Hamilton's work and see what the genetic outcome could be. And this is all, and they were, and they talked. And months and years went by, okay? But it was kind of what we did, what they did. Eventually it worked, it was now considered one of the main theories, explanations of the theory was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy in, what, 1999? And just as an indication of the excitement that the foxes made. Thank you, Bob, for that. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. You're welcome. Thank you. Who's that face? You have made a career of following Carl, which is not easy. I wanna echo what Paul said, and for all of Bob's personal accolades, I think the fact that the university is a better place because of him is something that we really should celebrate. And I wanna just give four quick snapshots. Bob is mentor, Bob is scientist, Bob is colleague, and Bob is role model. So as mentor, Bob is like, when you meet with Bob, it's like meeting with a Zen master. So let me just give one example of something I call the Axelrod rule that I've taught thousands of undergraduates. That is one time I said to Bob, Bob, how do you manage your schedule? And he says, I use something called the next Thursday rule. If somebody invites me to do something, at some point, it's gonna be next Thursday, right? And so you think about it, would I do this next Thursday? And if you wouldn't, don't do it now. So to the people of Fargo and the people of Lexington, Kentucky, I'm sorry I didn't go, but it's Bob's fault. Second thing, Bob is scientist. Bob, again, had all these sort of rules, like one of the things amazing about Bob is he writes and speaks and thinks with such clarity. He talks about keeping it simple, stupid in the context of his models, but that actually takes a lot of bravery to write articles that are clear and simple and to the point and don't obfuscate. And I think that as a scientist, whether you look at his work on Tit for Tat as culture model, his optimal timing of surprises, each of those projects could have been made so complicated, so sophisticated, with fancy language that no one could have understood him. And instead, Bob had the bravery and the courage, I think, to write work and to do work that other people could understand. Third is a colleague, Clark Kerr, former president of Houston, California, said that universities exist for three purposes. Football for the alumni, sex for the students, parking for the faculty. And while that's partly true, I think that what's most important with all the committees and everything else is that these are places of ideas. And one of the things that I actually did, a small amount of empirical work, Nancy, don't faint. And I look back at the last 80 emails I got from Bob, 61 had academic content, that's a three to one ratio. If you think about how much we communicate with one another and how much of it's actually really about ideas, read this paper, have you seen this thing? If we could live to that ratio, I just could only imagine what an amazing intellectual place that would be. And then last, Bob's exemplar, my wife, Jen and I, often ask ourselves what we call the Mary Oliver question, which is, I'm gonna show that recently, to see spot Mary Oliver, what will you do with your one wild and precious life, right? And that's a big question. And one of the things I've always looked up to Bob for is that again, he's had the courage to say, I'm just gonna work on this small problem of world peace. And so every day when you get up, Bob sets sort of a very high bar and has just been a huge role model for me and I know for many other people. And part of the reason this is a great public university is because Bob Axelrod has been here for almost five decades, making it one. So next for a longer talk will be Bob Putnam of Harvard, although Bob Putnam, some of us remember, at least I do, is really from Michigan, but has detoured to Harvard for 40 odd years. It's a pleasure to be, really is a pleasure for Rosemary and me to be back here. I think I can share this secret. Now where's Rosemary sitting? For the last, no, I got it. For the last 50 years, including the last 40 years, the password of our bank account has been gold blue. And I want to say to the Dean, this is a marvelous institution. I think I am the only person maybe in the room and possibly in the world who is actually in the small group of people who founded the predecessor of this institution. Because I remember coming to Michigan to be one of the founding members of the Ips Institute of Public Policy Studies. I'm not sure there are people even, do people know the term Ips anymore? Probably, okay, well it's a great university. It is a fabulous university. And this institution is a fabulous institution. I have a lot of things I want to say. I'm going to cut some of it because it's getting a little long. Bob has an extraordinary record of professional achievement, as we've already heard. And I'll maybe say a little bit about that later, although because people have talked about that already, I'm going to cut a little bit of what I was going to say about his public record. The reason is because I know Bob really well. There are probably only two people in this room who've known Bob longer than I have, his brother and my wife. I first met Bob 55 years ago this month as we began our graduate studies together at Yale in the fall of 1964. We met because my wife, Rosemary, back there, and Bob's brother, Dave, who is here, were in Sunday school together in Evanston, Illinois in the 1950s. And so my relationship with Bob had really deep roots. And because of that connection, Bob and I happened to make connections the first week of graduate school in New Haven. Bob is the only person outside of our immediate family who still calls Rosemary by her childhood name, Ro. So if somebody calls and they're asked for Ro, I'm sure it's Bob. I mean, I'm sure it's Bob that's asking for Ro or a bill collector or something. As it happened, Bob and I, that fall, the fall of 1964, were both students in Bob Dahl's seminar on democratic theory. And my first impression was that Bob was the smartest person I had ever met. Now you may want to discount that comparative evaluation. I mean, I was a hick from a small Midwestern town. How many smart people I could I have met? So to say that he was the smartest person I've ever met. And it was Ohio at that. But in the ensuing half century, I've been lucky enough to meet lots of really smart people, many of them in this room, and Bob has never lost that title for me. We soon discovered in Bob Dahl's class that we shared many intellectual interests, but that our minds were somehow wired differently. And I've long struggled to figure out how to put into words, because you'll see in a second, I've spent a lot of time thinking and talking with Bob. And therefore I've been trying to figure out how, because our minds are not wired the same. We're both reasonably successful as academics, but I think I want to say my mind is wide and Bob's is deep. That is, I'm pretty good at seeing patterns across a wide array of things. I notice things that I've seen in some other part of this, of data, actually, especially data. I'm pretty good at that. But Bob is even better at pursuing a theoretical issue deeply, deeply, deeply into its core. And discerning some fundamental, often mathematical truth that people hadn't ever gotten to before. And it turns out to have lots of unexpected implications in an astonishingly wide array of applications. So he's not narrow at all, I don't mean that, but he got to all this other stuff, cancer and world peace and all that, by going really deep. And when Bob is focused on some theoretical puzzle, he's like a terrier. He just digs deeper and deeper and deeper, just never letting go until he's figured it out in a deep way. And you know, Bob, this is true, because every time we get together, you're working on something and you're never satisfied until you've got down really deeply. Now, it may have been because of this mental complementarity that our minds are somehow different, but we share a lot of substantive interest in democratic theory initially, that Bob and I got into the, and this is really the topic sentence for what I wanna say, Bob and I got into the practice that fall, the fall of 1964, of getting together regularly, just to talk. We began in the tumbledown apartment where Rosemary and I lived, and we would just get together. Roughly once a week, as I remember, it may have been one of our other couple of weeks, and we would talk. And sometimes we talk about public affairs. This is, it's so old, that's so long ago that I remember spending hours with Bob chewing over the Vietnam War. This was the early days of the Vietnam War. Everybody in this room knows about the Vietnam War from after the fact, and what I mean therefore is, you know what was the right or wrong, but when you approached it from the other direction, at the beginning it was not quite so clear what the right, at least it wasn't clear to a lot of people what the right answer was, and I remember Bob and I talking a lot about that, but mostly we focused on scholarship, and mostly we focused on big, basic issues of basic democratic theory that Bob Doll's seminar was exploring that fall. For example, how big should a democracy be? Turns out that's actually, that's a complicated question if you think deeply about it. It's not at all clear how big a democracy should be, or what enabled democracy to work? Now, unlike lots of other people in this room, Bob and I have never worked or lived together in the same place ever. He's my closest professional colleague, and I've never lived in the same town as he had, because I worked hard to get him to Michigan, we worked hard together to get Bob to Michigan, and then the very year he arrived here, I left and went elsewhere, not because of Bob, obviously, but other things. But for decades now, almost every year, Bob and I have scheduled a visit of several days in which we take turns describing our current interests, our future interests, and offering deep, incisive, no holds barred, but affectionate criticism of one another's ideas. It's very rare to have that relationship with someone. In my experience, I've never experienced that, in which I felt so comfortable with somebody else that I would say really dumb ideas, and get back really thoughtful criticism. In my experience, this sort of relationship, I think is extremely rare, I actually don't know of any other examples of it, but I think both of us, certainly I would say, and I think Bob would say, that it's been essential to our own academic successes, because that's a terrific privilege to have, as you all can imagine. Let me give a couple of examples, and I apologize for being personal here, but this is supposed to be personal. I've never taken a course in game theory ever, except learning from Bob, as he explained his own research, and that goes back actually to the very beginning, because in the very beginning, Bob was even, certainly well before evolution of cooperation, actually even before his dissertation, he was talking about game theory and conflict and so on, and he stayed in touch with game theory, the rest of his career, and I have, therefore, just because all the time I'd be talking to him about it. And but I've never, never, ever studied game theory, I'm sorry, I'm embarrassed to say, but in nearly every project of my career, if you look at the projects in my career, from my dissertation, to my work on two level games, international affairs, to my discovery of the idea of social capital, at all those stages, game theory, as I learned from Bob in these private seminars, has always played a critical role. When I late one night in Oxford, stumbled onto Jim Coleman's book about social capital, I'd never heard of Jim Coleman, and I'd never heard of social capital, but I was up late and I was looking for a book to put me to sleep, and there was a big book on social theory, that sounded like just a ticket, and I turned to this chapter on social capital and I sat down and read it, and I, I'm not talking about me, because I had worked with Bob so long, I saw instantly what social capital was about and that it would be worth spending really the rest of my career on, and that was because just as repeat play games that Bob had talked about, embody the shadow of the future, it turns out that social capital embodies the shadow of the neighborhood. I'm not gonna give you the whole lecture here, but it turns out deep, deep underneath, the math of those two problems, that is the math of how the shadow of the neighborhood influences, can help you solve prisoner's limits, is almost identical to the math that Bob had worked out of why repeat play. I mean, I'm not gonna get all the client patients. Of course, repeat play doesn't always have work, it's magic, and networks don't always work their magic. What I'm trying to say is it's only because Bob had been insistent about teaching me about game theory all those years that I ever stumbled, understood the idea of social capital. Let me give a different example. In the early 1970s, while I was a young assistant professor working at that point at Haven Hall, I don't know, does Haven Hall still exist? Maybe it's been torn down. In, as I remember, room 624 in Haven Hall, pardon, that doesn't exist, there should be a metal there. I had begun, while there, I'd begun more or less by accident a study of regional government in Italy. Don't ask why I'd done it, it was not clear. And 20 years later, I had long gone from Ann Arbor, and the study was still unfinished. And because a study of Italian local government, it turned out, was of interest only to the four academics in the world who cared about Italian local government. And I was in that frustrated frame of mind one fall when I returned to Ann Arbor for one of my regular meetings with Bob. Bob will remember this dinner. Over a long dinner at a restaurant, I couldn't remember the name of the restaurant, but it was on Packard Avenue, I could take it to where the restaurant was. I explained to Bob that I'd gotten into this dead end of this decades long by then investment that I'd made. And Bob summarized the problem very succinctly. He said, I remember what he said, don't publish until whatever you have to say will it be of interest to people who couldn't care less about Italian government. Now that seems obvious, right? But I was in a frame of mind in which I could see I could get out of this mess if I just raised my sights a little bit. And then we considered how to raise the sights of this project. And Bob harkened back to this seminar with Bob Dahl on democratic theory and on, as I remember I told you, part of that study was what makes democracy work. And I left Ann Arbor that next day with a clarified mission and within four years I published a book called Making Democracy Work, which turned out to work out okay. And that was Bob, not just the title, but I wouldn't have gotten there without Bob's, without this intellectual friendship. I know that he's a great collaborator with everybody, but I'm just trying to tell you that goes back really deeply in his career. And then while I'm in still in this mode of personal reflection, let me add a lecture lecture from Rosemary that every time Bob, who was then still single, would visit us, remember he came often, he invariably brought a very thoughtful, exceptionally intelligent gift for our two kids who are now in their early fifties, but at that point weren't. They were in their early, not even their early teens, they were in their early, their early whatever, odds. Bob was, and it was often a brain teasing toy. Bob, you remember all this? I hope you remember this. And he was like a doting uncle when he arrived. And knowing, we know therefore, we knew he was gonna be a great dad. And there, but you know, it takes two to tangle. We've heard that already. And therefore we rejoice when Bob met Amy. Where's Amy sitting? When Bob met Amy because, and they had two brilliant dollars of their own. And as we fully expected, Bob became a doting parent himself, and is now doubtless, a doting grandfather. And then when these two families are very interconnected, I'm gonna stop with the personal stuff in a second. But this is relevant. When this little daughter of ours, when she grew up, she came back to Michigan and became a PhD in history here, moved here with her husband who was from Costa Rica. And the two people in Ann Arbor who welcomed our daughter were of course, Bob and Amy. I know, I'm just telling you another example of what a nice guy he is and what a nice couple they are. But it goes back a long way. I wanna say one more enduring recollection from our earliest days. This has been already referred to, but I can take it back quite early. Bob's mind as we all know, is dauntingly theoretical and even abstract. But it was also clear from the very first encounters that we had, when he was probably still a teenager at that point when we were in graduate school because he'd gone, you know, rushed ahead, it was clear that his most fundamental drive was not academic, he wanted to change the world. And he wanted to avert nuclear war. That was, that's not something he came to him later. That was actually even before the academic stuff. I'm not sure it was even before the math, but it was certainly even before the poli sci. Bob and I were just having disagreement about this. I think he was in the summer of 1964 that he worked in McNamara's Pentagon. Bob thinks it was in 1965. We'll work about that later. But Bob came away from that work in the Pentagon, convinced that his gifts would be best deployed, not in government, but in the academy. And he always, whenever he would later in his career and some of you will know later events like this, Bob would spend a little time in Washington and then decide that wasn't for him, that this was, I mean, the academy was the right place. And that was true even that first encounter. And you know how far afield from nuclear strategy that motivation, but it's still the same motivation. He wants to make the world a safer place. And so ethnic conflict in the Balkans or confidence building between the Palestinians and Israelis or negotiations with the Soviet intellectuals as the Cold War was ending or cancer research or most recently cyber security and cyber warfare, all of those were aimed at putting this incredible mind to work on a very specific, sounds like it's not right to say it's very specific, but it's very clear topic, can we make the world safer? And some of the most enjoyable hours I've ever spent in my life have been in conversation with Bob about those real world problems. I was sort of serving as a sounding board and sometimes a sparring partner as he would try out new theoretical perspectives. Only once have actually I had the pleasure of accompanying Bob into the field on those policy journeys of his. I'm not sure, Bob, whether you remember this, but that led unexpectedly in the last years of the Soviet Union, I'm compressing a much longer story, to an unforgettable, long, sadden late evening, sauna in a KGB manner in the Estonian countryside with a group of completely drunk Soviet defense intellectuals. Bob will do nothing, solves it nothing to make this world a safer place. I had some more things here about the most cited work of social science in the last half century and the Wall Street Journal saying our ideas of cooperation will never be the same and I do wanna say just one thing about evolution of cooperation. Among the reasons for the extraordinary impact of this book is that it combines this deeply rigorous, logical and mathematical and empirical analysis with exceptionally accessible prose. Who will ever forget the chapter on the Christmas truce in World War I? And if you don't know what I'm talking about, it's because you have not read Bob's book. I'm skipping over these raft of things he's done. The youngest political scientist and maybe the youngest social scientist in the National Academy of Sciences, the MacArthur Fellow, the National Academy of Sciences Award for behavioral research, the Cleveland Prize that was mentioned, President of the APSR, the Johan, I'm gonna pronounce this correctly, the Johan Shitta Prize. Most people don't pronounce it correctly but that's what it's called, for that's our discipline's closest equivalent to the Nobel Prize. And of course, the National Medal of Science. I could go on, of course, but it would be simpler just to name the major awards for scholarly excellence that Bob has not won. I just did. What's truly amazing about Bob's career from the perspective of someone who's been hanging around him, my good fortune since that career began 55 years ago, is that instead of resting on his laurels, which any sane person would have done, he's continued to stay at least a decade ahead of the mainstream work in conflict resolution, in governance, in the use of technology and teaching, in cyber warfare and computer-based analytic models and so on. He's left an enormous legacy, as has been said by other people here, so I'm gonna not say it here, but again, but it's certainly true, that the role that he's played as a mentor here and elsewhere is pretty extraordinary. But I want to just want to close, because I thought you might like to hear, I happen to know this, what the world's undisputed arbiter of academic excellence, that is, Harvard, what Harvard thinks of Bob. I had the immense pleasure of witnessing close-up, really close-up, the ceremony in which Bob Harvard awarded Bob an honorary degree four years ago. And one useful way to summarize what the rest of the world thinks of Bob is to repeat verbatim what was said about him at that ceremony. I did not take notes at the time, but I've gone back and listened to the whole. So I'm gonna impersonate the Harvard provost. What leads us to cooperate, the provost began? An illustrious political scientist, Robert Axelrod, has shaped our understanding of what induces us to come together rather than go our separate ways. Remember, you have to imagine, there are thousands of people in Harvard Yard and across the world listening, and the provost is saying this. His publications on the evolution and complexity of cooperation stand among the world's most frequently cited writings in the social sciences, and he has brought his theoretical insights to bear on a sweeping range of problems, the avoidance of nuclear war, the nature of biological evolution, international trade, cybersecurity, cooperation among cancer cells. His methods draw on complexity theory and game theory and computer modeling, the provost said, in ways that have continually reshaped the frontiers of these fields. In an extraordinarily rare tribute for a social scientist, he was awarded the National Medal of Science. As a pair of colleagues recently wrote, it is hard to name an active, this is the provost now quoting several unnamed people, to name an active political scientist anywhere in the world whose ideas have had such a powerful effect on such a wide range of human inquiry and action. It's not only academics who have felt his touch, the provost continued, when Bono was asked the secret of U2's longevity as a rock band, he reportedly named Professor Axelrod's seminal book on the evolution of cooperation. I'm continuing to quote here. We proudly recognize a rock star of social science, the Walgreen Professor for the Study of Human Understanding at the University of Michigan, Robert Axelrod. I don't have a glass, but I ask you to join me in a celebratory toast to Bob Axelrod, rock star. Rock on, Bob. Now most of you have never seen me in a suit. And here I am. And I suppose most of you have never seen me blushing, but that's what I'm doing. What I really want to say is thank you. And last week I started to make a list of all the things I should thank you for as individuals, as friends, as colleagues, as relatives, and as representatives of the university, the Department of Political Science, the Ford School. And after thinking about the list, I realized that if I read it today, we'd be here till Monday morning. So instead I'll just give you a couple of bullet points. But first, to stick with the classiness of the event, of the wine and the music, let me quote Cicero. He said that gratitude is not only the greatest of all virtues, it's the parent of all the others. I feel that I've been remiss in not expressing often enough, or fully enough, the gratitude I feel. And today it's been brought home to me once more in so many ways from what you've just heard. Let me start with the gratitude I feel toward Michigan for having hired me when Berkeley turned me down for tenure. It was a difficult moment to say the least. People here could have said, well, Berkeley knew Bob better than they did. And if they didn't think he was worthy of tenure, then why should Michigan make a lifelong commitment? But Michigan did, and I'm always grateful. The Ford School and the Political Science Department have been my home since I arrived 45 years ago. And I'm grateful for the many ways they've supported me. Nancy Burns and Michael Barr follow a long line of previous chairs and deans, all of whom did so much to empower my work to the generosity of the resources they provided. And by letting me teach pretty much whatever I wanted, even when it was a bizarre subject like sense making. I appreciate too that you've never pressured me to be a candidate for dean or department chair. Maybe you know that I just wasn't cut out for it. After all, I'm better at candor than attacked. And so I'm grateful for those of you who did step up to the plate and work so hard to hire great colleagues and to make life as easy as possible for all the rest of us. I'm grateful for being at the university, which is arguably the best collection of social science departments and related professional schools of any place in the world. I've certainly taken advantage of lots of them. Moreover, Michigan is where people really walk the walk of interdisciplinarity. The Institute for Social Research has set the gold standard for interdisciplinarity in the social sciences. And for me, the interdisciplinary Bach group that you've heard about has been central. I was gonna say a little about it, but you've already heard about it, so I don't have to repeat that. But it was met for 30 years, included beloved Michael Cohn and Scott Page and Carl Simon that you've heard from today. Now, as you know, I'm best known for my book on the evolution of cooperation. And I just wanna express my gratitude to Amy, who among so many other things played a major role in making that book as accessible. And even if I dare say so, as inviting to read as it is. Now here's the thing, I'm not really retiring. Yeah, I'm no longer teaching. And you can use my salary to hire other people. But I do intend to continue my research and public engagement. For example, I'm working to confront Russia's hostile influence campaigns, and you've heard I'm working with the Chinese to see if we can get along with them, especially in the area of potential cyber conflict. I'm gonna leave climate change and racial and gender prejudice to others. But I reserve the right to take up other challenges that I might be able to contribute to. Meanwhile, thanks for being there for me.