- Person
- Robert Aumann
- Lived
- b. 1930
- Field
- Game theory
- From
- Israeli-American
The story
Robert Aumann has always insisted that science is the work of many minds. In the autobiography he wrote for the Nobel Foundation after sharing the 2005 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, he said a good part of his prize was owed to the more than thirty scientists he had collaborated with, and named his students as prominent among the many people who had influenced him. Among the great pleasures of his life he listed the satisfaction of teaching, recalling a former student who told him years later that his course in complex variables was the most beautiful he had ever heard.
Aumann joined the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1956, and over the following decades he supervised a remarkable group of doctoral students. David Schmeidler, who studied with him through the 1960s, developed the nucleolus, a way of solving cooperative games based on fairness as well as feasibility. That idea later became the key to Aumann and Michael Maschler's celebrated explanation of a 2,000-year-old bankruptcy puzzle in the Talmud. Schmeidler went on to professorships at Tel Aviv University and Ohio State University and made major contributions to decision theory.
Sergiu Hart, who completed his doctorate under Aumann in 1976, became the founding director of the Hebrew University's Center for the Study of Rationality from 1991 to 1999, coedited the Handbook of Game Theory with Aumann, and served as president of the international Game Theory Society. Abraham Neyman, whose 1977 thesis studied games with a continuum of players, became a professor of mathematics in Jerusalem and supervised a dozen doctoral students of his own. Yair Tauman, another of Aumann's doctoral students, became director of the Center for Game Theory at Stony Brook University in New York and has organised its international summer conferences in game theory for more than thirty years.
Through these students and their own students, Aumann's rigorous style of thinking spread through universities in Israel, the United States and Europe, and into economics, business, computer science and public policy. Together they helped make Israel one of the world's leading centres of game theory, a remarkable achievement for a small country.
Aumann's teaching has also reached far beyond the university. He has lectured on his Talmud paper dozens or perhaps hundreds of times, to high school students and teachers as well as to scientists, and the research centre he helped found now offers a game theory course for high school students.
Why it matters
Aumann's students have carried game theory into economics, computer science and public policy, and trained students of their own, multiplying the reach of his ideas.
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.
- 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.
Sources
- Robert Aumann Wikipedia
- Robert J. Aumann, Biographical NobelPrize.org
- Sergiu Hart 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.