Robert Aumann
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Yisrael Robert John Aumann (ישראל אומן) (born June 8, 1930) is an Israeli mathematician and a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences. He works at the Center for the Study of Rationality in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel.
Aumann was awarded the 2005 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics for "having enhanced our understanding of conflict and cooperation through game-theory analysis". He shared the prize with Thomas Schelling.
Early life and education
Aumann was born in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, and fled to the United States with his family in 1938, two weeks before the Kristallnacht riots. For high school he attended the Rabbi Jacob Joseph Yeshiva in New York City. He graduated from the City College of New York in 1950 with a B.S. in Mathematics. He received his M.S. in 1952, and his Ph.D. in Mathematics in 1955, both from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His doctoral dissertation, Asphericity of Alternating Linkages, concerned knot theory. His advisor was George Whitehead, Jr.. In 1956 he joined the Mathematics faculty of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In 1982 Aumann's son Shlomo was killed during Operation Peace for the Galilee while serving as a tank gunner in the Israel Defense Forces's armored corps.Contribution
Aumann's greatest contribution was in the realm of repeated games, which are situations in which players encounter the same situation over and over again.Aumann was the first to define the concept of correlated equilibrium in game theory, which is a type of equilibrium in non-cooperative games that is more flexible than the classical Nash Equilibrium. Furthermore, Aumann has introduced the first purely formal account of the notion of common knowledge in game theory.
Aumann used Game Theory also to analyze Talmudic dilemmas. He was able to solve the mystery about the "division problem", a long-time dilemma of explaining the Talmudic rationale in dividing the heritage of a late husband to his three wives, depending on the worth of the heritage (compared to its original worth). He dedicated the article in that matter to his son, Shlomo Aumann, who was killed as a soldier in Operation Peace For Galilee.
These are some of the theses of Aumann's Nobel lecture, named "War and Peace" [link]:
- War is not irrational, but must be scientifically studied in order to be understood, and eventually conquered;
- Repeated game study de-emphasizes the "now" for the sake of the "later";
- Simplistic peacemaking can cause war, while arms race, credible war threats and mutually assured destruction can reliably prevent war.
Torah codes controversy
Aumann has drawn criticism for his support of Torah codes research. In his position as both a religious Jew and a man of science, the codes research holds special interest to him. He has partially vouched for the validity of the Great Rabbis Experiment by Doron Witztum, Eliyahu Rips, and Yoav Rosenberg, which was published in Statistical Science. Aumann not only arranged for Rips to give a lecture on Torah codes in the Israeli Academy of Sciences, but sponsored the Witztum-Rips-Rosenberg paper for publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The Academy requires a member to sponsor any publication in its Proceedings; the paper was turned down however.In 1996, a committee consisting of Robert J. Aumann, Dror Bar-Natan, Hillel Furstenberg, Isaak Lapides, and Rips, was formed to examine the results that had been reported by H.J. Gans regarding the existence of "encoded" text in the bible foretelling events that took place many years after the Bible was written. The committee performed two additional tests in the spirit of the Gans experiments. Both tests failed to confirm the existence of the putative code.
After that experiment, Aumann
Awards
He has received the following awards:- 1983: Harvey Prize in Science and Technology
- 1994: Israel Prize for Economical Research
- 2002: Emet Prize for economics
- 2005: Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel (shared $1.3 million USD prize with Thomas Schelling)
Selected publications
- Values of Non-Atomic Games, Princeton University Press,Princeton, 1974 (with L. S. Shapley).
- Game Theory (in Hebrew), Everyman's University, Tel Aviv, 1981 (with Y. Tauman and S. Zamir), Vol 1，Vol 2.
- Lectures on Game Theory, Underground Classics in Economics, Westview Press, Boulder, 1989.
- Handbook of Game Theory with economic applications, Vol 1-3, Elsevier, Amsterdam (coedited with S. Hart).
- Repeated Games with Incomplete Information, MIT Press, Cambridge, 1995 (with M. Maschler).
- Collected Papers, Vol 1-2, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2000.
- Asphericity of alternating knots. Ann. of Math. (2) 64 1956 374--392.
References
Works Cited
External links
- [His homepage]
- [His CV]
- [Extensive interview of Prof. Aumann shortly before his selection as the Nobel laureate by Sergiu Hart]
- [Nobel Prize Announcement]
- [More information about that Nobel Prize] (Pdf)
- [Recording of the Nobel Prize announcement and Prof. Aumann's reaction to the prize]
- [János Bolyai Prize]
- [2002 EMET Award]
- [Center for the Study of Rationality]
- [Solution to Talmud bankruptcy problem, from the Journal of Economic Theory, 1985]
- [A report from the first press conference shortly after the announcement + Picture] (in hebrew)
- [Une approche critique des travaux des deux Prix Nobel]
- [Nobel laureate seeks 'cure' for war]
- Chris McGreal. [Calls grow for withdrawal of Nobel prize], Guardian, December 10, 2005.
- ["Madness in the method" by Bar-Hillel and Margali (explains Aumann's role in Torah codes controversy]
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