Robert Aumann

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Israel 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 Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, colloquially known as the Nobel Prize in Economics, for "having enhanced our understanding of conflict and cooperation through game-theory analysis". He shared the prize with Thomas Schelling.

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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.

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.

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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 studied the notion of common knowledge in game theory in a rigorous way.

As a religious Jew, 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.

Aumann is a member in the Professors for a Strong Israel (PSI), a non-partisan organization of academics united by a shared concern for the security and the Jewish character of the State of Israel, and support the principle of Greater Israel.

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Torah codes controversy

Aumann has drawn some fire for his interest in Torah codes research. He has partially vouched for the validity of the Great Rabbis Experiment by Eliyahu Rips and Doron Witztum. In his position as both a devout Jew and a man of science, the codes research holds special interest to him.

In 1996, a committee that includes Robert J. Aumann and Hillel Furstenberg 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.

The discusion Paper

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Awards

He has received the following awards:

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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.
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External links

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