Robert Aumann

Aumann was born in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, and fled to the United States with his family in 1938, two weeks before the Kristallnacht pogrom. He attended the Rabbi Jacob Joseph School, a yeshiva high school in New York City.

Aumann graduated from the City College of New York in 1950 with a B.Sc. in Mathematics. He received his M.Sc. 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 and has been a visiting professor at Stony Brook University since 1989. He has held visiting professorship at the University of California, Berkeley (1971, 1985–1986), Stanford University (1975–1976, 1980–1981), and Universite Catholique de Louvain (1972, 1978, 1984).[1]

Mathematical and scientific contribution

Aumann at a meeting in 2008.

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. He collaborated with Lloyd Shapley on the Aumann–Shapley value. He is also known for his agreement theorem, in which he argues that under his given conditions, two Bayesian rationalists with common prior beliefs cannot agree to disagree.[2]

Aumann and Maschler used game theory to analyze Talmudic dilemmas.[3] They were able to solve the mystery about the "division problem", a long-standing 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.[4] The article in that matter was dedicated to a son of Aumann, Shlomo, who was killed during the 1982 Lebanon War, while serving as a tank gunner in the Israel Defense Forces's armored corps.

Aumann's Ph.D. students include: Bezalel Peleg, David Schmeidler, Shmuel Zamir, Elon Kohlberg, Zvi Artstein, Benyamin Shitovitz, Eugene Wesley, Sergiu Hart, Abraham Neyman, Yair Tauman, Dov Samet, Ehud Lehrer, Yossi Feinberg, Itai Arieli, Uri Weiss and Yosef Zohar.

These are some of the themes of Aumann's Nobel lecture, named "War and Peace":[7]

1. War is not irrational, but must be scientifically studied in order to be understood, and eventually conquered;
2. Repeated game study de-emphasizes the "now" for the sake of the "later";
3. Simplistic peacemaking can cause war, while an arms race, credible war threats and mutually assured destruction can reliably prevent war.

Aumann is a member in the Professors for a Strong Israel (PSI), a right-wing political group. Aumann opposed the disengagement from Gaza in 2005 claiming it is a crime against Gush Katif settlers and a serious threat to the security of Israel. Aumann draws on a case in game theory called the Blackmailer Paradox to argue that giving land to the Arabs is strategically foolish based on the mathematical theory.[8] By presenting an unyielding demand, the Arab states force Israel to "yield to blackmail due to the perception that it will leave the negotiating room with nothing if it is inflexible".

As a result of his political views, and his use of his research to justify them, the decision to give him the Nobel prize was criticized in the European press. A petition to cancel his prize garnered signatures from 1,000 academics worldwide.[9]

In a speech to a religious Zionist youth movement, Bnei Akiva, Aumann claimed that Israel is in "deep trouble". He revealed his belief that the anti-Zionist Satmar Jews might have been right in their condemnation of the original Zionist movement. "I fear the Satmars were right", he said, and quoted a verse from Psalm 127: "Unless the Lord builds a house, its builders toil on it in vain." Aumann feels that the historical Zionist establishment failed to transmit its message to its successors, because it was secular. The only way that Zionism can survive, according to Aumann, is if it has a religious basis.[10]

In 2008, Aumann joined the new political party Ahi led by Effi Eitam and Yitzhak Levy.[11]

Aumann married Esther Schlesinger in April 1955 in Brooklyn. They had met in 1953, when Esther, who was from Israel, was visiting the United States. The couple had five children; the oldest, Shlomo, was killed in action while serving in the Israel Defense Forces in the 1982 Lebanon War. Esther died of ovarian cancer in October 1998. In late November 2005, Aumann married Esther's widowed sister, Batya Cohn.[12]

• 1974: Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences[13]
• 1983: Harvey Prize in Science and Technology.
• 1994: Israel Prize for economics.[14]
• 1998: Erwin Plein Nemmers Prize in Economics from Northwestern University.[15]
• 2002: The EMET Prize in the Social Sciences category, for Economics[16]
• 2005: Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (share US$1.3 million prize with Thomas Schelling).
• 2006: Yakir Yerushalayim (Worthy Citizen of Jerusalem) award from the city of Jerusalem.[17]

• 1956: "Asphericity of alternating knots", Annals of Mathematics 64: 374–92 doi:10.2307/1969980
• 1974: (with L.S. Shapley) Values of Non-Atomic Games, Princeton University Press
• 1981: (with Y. Tauman and S. Zamir) Game Theory, volumes 1 & 2 (in Hebrew), Everyman's University, Tel Aviv
• 1989: Lectures on Game Theory, Underground Classics in Economics, Westview Press
• 1992,94,2002: (coedited with Sergiu Hart) Handbook of Game Theory with Economic Applications, volumes 1,2 & 3 Elsevier
• 1995: (with M. Maschler) Repeated Games with Incomplete Information, MIT Press
• 2000: Collected Papers, volumes 1 & 2, MIT Press.

• List of Israel Prize recipients
• List of Israeli Nobel laureates
• List of Jewish Nobel laureates
• List of economists

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