- Person
- Robert Aumann
- Lived
- b. 1930
- Field
- Game theory
- From
- Israeli-American
The story
Robert Aumann was born in Frankfurt in 1930 and came to New York with his family in 1938, fleeing Nazi Germany. A high school teacher, Abraham Gansler, taught him to love mathematics, and at the City College of New York he was drawn to its purest branches, above all number theory. Part of the appeal, he later wrote in his Nobel autobiography, was that the subject seemed to have no practical use whatsoever.
At MIT he did his doctorate under the topologist George Whitehead in knot theory, another field he loved partly for its uselessness. Whitehead set him a problem that had resisted attack for a quarter of a century, proving that knots are aspheric. Aumann did not solve it in general, but proved it for the special class of alternating knots, and his thesis, completed in 1955, appeared in the Annals of Mathematics in 1956.
His first job, though, was intensely practical. He joined the Analytical Research Group, an operations research consulting team affiliated with Princeton University's mathematics department and based at its Forrestal Center. One problem he was assigned was how to defend a city against a squadron of aircraft, a few carrying nuclear weapons and most of them decoys. Aumann remembered conversations at MIT with John Nash, then a young instructor, who had told him a little about game theory, the mathematics of strategic decisions. At the time it had not interested him much. Now he realised it was the right tool for a problem in which attacker and defender are each trying to outguess the other.
He learned just enough game theory to tackle the problem, and then found himself captivated by the subject in its own right. In 1956 he moved to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and within a few years he had written the first rigorous general treatment of repeated games. Game theory became his life's work, and half a century later it brought him the 2005 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, shared with Thomas Schelling.
His early pure mathematics turned out to matter too. Aumann recalled that around fifty years after he finished his thesis, his grandson, a medical student, phoned to ask him about knots, because knotted DNA can play a part in cancer. For Aumann the lesson was that research driven purely by curiosity eventually leads to the useful.
Why it matters
Aumann's move from pure mathematics into game theory gave the young field one of its most rigorous and creative minds, and his career became a lasting argument for curiosity-driven research.
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 co-founded Jerusalem's Center for RationalityAround 1990–91 Robert Aumann helped found the Center for Rationality at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, a game theory centre drawing members from more than a dozen departments.
- 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.
- 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 J. Aumann, Biographical NobelPrize.org
- Robert Aumann Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.