- Person
- Robert Aumann
- Lived
- b. 1930
- Field
- Game theory
- From
- Israeli-American
The story
Robert Aumann was born in Frankfurt in 1930 and fled Nazi Germany with his family in 1938, settling in New York. After degrees from the City College of New York and a doctorate in mathematics from MIT in 1955, he moved to Israel and joined the mathematics department of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1956. He has been there ever since, and over the following decades he and his colleagues, above all his longtime collaborator Michael Maschler, made Jerusalem one of the world's leading centres of game theory.
By the late 1980s the ideas of game theory, the mathematics of strategic decisions, had spread far beyond mathematics into economics, political science, biology and computer science. Researchers in these fields were often asking the same questions about how people and organisations choose when their goals conflict, but rarely worked together. Aumann's university biography records that in 1990 he was among the founders of the Center for Rationality at the Hebrew University; the centre itself gives its founding year as 1991 and credits the pioneering work of Aumann and the economist Menahem Yaari as its main inspiration. His doctoral student Sergiu Hart served as its founding director from 1991 to 1999.
Aumann's biography describes it as an interdisciplinary centre built around game theory with members from more than a dozen departments, including business, economics, psychology, computer science, law, mathematics, ecology and philosophy. Its premise is that the study of rational and strategic decision-making does not belong to any one discipline. Through workshops, conferences, a discussion paper series and joint research, it has encouraged mathematicians, economists, psychologists and others to look beyond their own specialties at how individuals with different goals interact.
Since the 2005 to 2006 academic year, the year Aumann shared the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, the centre, now the Federmann Center for the Study of Rationality, has run a doctoral programme for outstanding students drawn from its member disciplines across Israel. It also offers a game theory course for high school students. Aumann remains a professor there.
He also helped build game theory abroad. He has held a visiting position at Stony Brook University in New York since 1989 and was one of the founding members of its Center for Game Theory, which is directed by another of his former students, Yair Tauman.
Why it matters
The Center for Rationality made Jerusalem a global hub for research on strategic decision-making, bringing many disciplines together and training scholars who now teach and work around the world.
About Robert Aumann
German-born Orthodox Jewish mathematician in Jerusalem whose theory of repeated games showed how cooperation can last between rivals; Nobel Prize in Economics 2005.
More about Robert Aumann
- Robert Aumann proved rational people can't agree to disagreeIn his 1976 paper Agreeing to Disagree, Robert Aumann gave the first formal definition of common knowledge and proved that rational people sharing the same starting beliefs cannot agree to disagree.
- Robert Aumann invented correlated equilibriumRobert Aumann was the first to define correlated equilibrium, a broader idea than the Nash equilibrium that shows how a shared signal or mediator can help rivals coordinate.
- A nuclear defence puzzle drew Robert Aumann to game theoryRobert Aumann, trained in pure mathematics, turned to game theory in the 1950s to solve a practical problem: how to defend a city against bombers when most of them are decoys.
- Robert Aumann showed mathematically why cooperation lastsRobert Aumann proved that repeated encounters can make cooperation between rivals rational, work on conflict and cooperation that earned him the 2005 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences.
- Robert Aumann's game theory served nuclear arms controlIn the mid-1960s Robert Aumann and Michael Maschler developed the theory of repeated games with incomplete information for a US agency preparing arms control talks with the Soviet Union.
- Robert Aumann and Lloyd Shapley analysed games of the manyWith Lloyd Shapley, Robert Aumann wrote Values of Non-Atomic Games in 1974, extending game theory to markets and elections with huge numbers of players and giving rise to the Aumann–Shapley value.
- Robert Aumann trained a generation of game theoristsRobert Aumann's doctoral students at the Hebrew University include Sergiu Hart, Abraham Neyman, David Schmeidler and Yair Tauman, each a leading figure in game theory.
Sources
- Robert Aumann, Brief biography Hebrew University of Jerusalem
- Robert Aumann Wikipedia
- History & Vision Federmann Center for the Study of Rationality, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
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