Ronald J. Williams
Also known as Ronald James Williams, Ron Williams, Ron J. Williams, Ronald Williams
Ronald J. Williams was a mathematician and computer scientist whose 1986 back-propagation paper, written with David Rumelhart and Geoffrey Hinton, describes a learning procedure for neural networks. Before that, he studied mathematics at the California Institute of Technology and UC San Diego, and from 1983 to 1986 he was a member of UC San Diego's Parallel Distributed Processing group. In 1986 he became a professor of computer science at Northeastern University, and in 1992 he introduced the REINFORCE algorithm for reinforcement learning. He died in 2024 at age 79, having been a professor emeritus of computer science at Khoury College.
- Works
- 89
- Citations
- 65,339
- h-index
- 30
Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 15 October 2026.
Timeline
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1966
A B.S. in mathematics
He receives a B.S. in mathematics from the California Institute of Technology in 1966.
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1972–1975
A Ph.D. at UC San Diego
He completes an M.A. in mathematics in 1972 and a Ph.D. in 1975 at UC San Diego.
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1983–1986
A seat in the PDP group
From 1983 to 1986 he is a member of the Parallel Distributed Processing research group, which David Rumelhart heads at the Institute for Cognitive Science at UC San Diego.
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1986
A professorship at Northeastern
He accepts a professorship in computer science at Northeastern University in 1986, after working for a defense contractor.
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1986
Back-propagation in Nature
He co-authors the Nature paper on back-propagation with David Rumelhart and Geoffrey Hinton in 1986. The paper describes a learning procedure for networks of neurone-like units. Khoury College says that platforms such as ChatGPT can trace their origins to the paper.
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1989
A recurrent learning algorithm
He and David Zipser publish 'A learning algorithm for continually running fully recurrent neural networks' in Neural Computation in 1989.
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1992
The REINFORCE algorithm
He introduces the REINFORCE algorithm for reinforcement learning in 1992, in a paper published in Machine Learning.
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2024
Death at age 79
He dies in 2024 at age 79, having been a professor emeritus of computer science at Khoury College.
Sources and credits
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- Ronald J. Williams - Wikipedia
- A tribute to Ron Williams, Khoury professor and machine learning pioneer - Khoury College of Computer Sciences
- Learning representations by back-propagating errors | Nature
- Ron Williams - Khoury College of Computer Sciences
- Publications of Ronald J. Williams Available for Downloading