David Hawkins

Who was David Hawkins?

David Hawkins was a professor whose interests included the philosophy of science, mathematics, economics, childhood science education, and ethics. He also served as the official historian of the Manhattan Project.

He was born in El Paso, Texas, the son of William Ashton Hawkins and Clara Gardiner Hawkins. He grew up in El Paso and in La Luz, New Mexico.

He received a B.A. in 1934 and an M.A. in 1936 from Stanford University. He was awarded a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley in 1940. Together with Herbert A. Simon, Hawkins discovered and proved the Hawkins–Simon theorem on the “conditions for the existence of positive solution vectors for input-output matrices."

He was a founding member of the Federation of American Scientists.

In 1970 Hawkins and his wife, Francis née Pockman, a leader in early childhood education, founded the CU campus-based Mountain View Center for Environmental Education.

In 1981 he received a $300,000 "genius grant" from the MacArthur Foundation.

He died of natural causes on February 24, 2002.