Aumann, Robert John (1930– )

Israeli mathematician and economist. A professor at the Center for Rationality at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel, he won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2005 for his work on game theory, sharing the prize with US economist Thomas Schelling.

He received the Nobel Prize for using game theory to enhance understanding of the causes of economic conflict, for example trade wars, and cooperation, for example managing community resources. He is known for developing the concept of ‘correlated equilibrium’ (1974) in game theory and for defining the concept of ‘common knowledge’ (1976).

He was born in Frankfurt, Germany, and escaped to the USA with his family in 1938, just before the Holocaust. He earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics from City College of New York in 1950 and a doctorate in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1955. The following year he began teaching mathematics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences.