“Although there had been previous research on genetic algorithms and related evolutionary algorithms, John’s book was a turning point in the field,” said John E. Laird, a professor of engineering at the University of Michigan who works on artificial intelligence. “It marked the beginning of a sustained body of research on genetic algorithms that has continued for over 40 years.”

Image John Henry Holland Credit... The Santa Fe Institute

John Henry Holland was born on Feb. 2, 1929, in Fort Wayne, Ind., and grew up in several small Ohio towns where his father, Gustave, set up soybean-processing mills. His mother, the former Mildred Gfroerer, often worked as his accountant.

After graduating from high school in Van Wert, Ohio, he attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he worked on the first real-time computer, Whirlwind, and earned a physics degree in 1950.

For the next year and a half, he worked at IBM’s main research laboratory in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., on the company’s first commercial computer, the 701, called the Defense Calculator. As a way of testing the computer, he and his team leader, Nathaniel Rochester, devised a program to simulate Hebb’s theory of cell assemblies, which seeks to explain the way neurons in the brain self-organize during the learning process. Such neural-network simulations later became standard in artificial intelligence research.

At the same time, one of his colleagues, the electrical engineer Arthur Samuel, taught the computer to play checkers. Samuel showed that a computer program could be self-improvable. With time, the 701 adapted its tactics to the other player’s moves, becoming a better player. The lesson was not lost on Dr. Holland.

After earning a master’s degree in mathematics at the University of Michigan, he did doctoral work in the school’s new department of communication sciences and in 1959 received its first Ph.D. in what would later be called computer science. His dissertation, “Cycles in Logical Nets,” described the changes caused when feedback was introduced into logical networks.

He spent his entire career at the University of Michigan, where he was a professor of electrical engineering and computer science, and a professor of psychology. He helped create the university’s cognitive science program in the 1970s and, in 1999, the Center for the Study of Complex Systems. In the mid-1980s, he became a core participant in the Santa Fe Institute. Created by senior scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory for the interdisciplinary study of complex systems, it quickly became a clearing house for the most advanced ideas in the field. He went on to serve as a trustee and as a member of its science advisory board.