This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times. Unlike most of the 120,000 Japanese Americans detained in internment camps in the United States during World War II, James Sakoda had a mission: to document the experience of incarceration. He took about 1,800 pages of notes, largely in private, lest he be accused of being a traitor or a spy. Those notes would form the basis of his 1949 dissertation on the dynamics of individuals and groups at one of these camps, the Minidoka War Relocation Center in Idaho. Tucked into Appendix B of the paper was possibly the first example of what is known as an “agent-based model” — a simulation of how individual actions can add up to large-scale patterns.

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