Robert Aumann

Robert John Aumann (Hebrew name: ‫ישראל אומן‬, Yisrael

Robert Aumann
Aumann; born June 8, 1930) is an Israeli-American
mathematician, and a member of the United States National
Academy of Sciences. He is a professor at the Center for the Study
of Rationality in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel. He
also holds a visiting position at Stony Brook University, and is one
of the founding members of the Stony Brook Center for Game
Theory.

Aumann received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences

in 2005 for his work on conflict and cooperation through game
theory analysis.[1] He shared the prize with Thomas Schelling.[1]

Early years
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, Aumann in 2015
a yeshiva high school in New York City.
Born Robert John
Aumann
Academic career 8 June 1930
Frankfurt, Hesse-
Aumann graduated from the City College of New York in 1950
Nassau, Prussia
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 Nationality Israeli, American
Institute of Technology. His doctoral dissertation, Asphericity of Alma mater City College of New
Alternating Linkages, concerned knot theory. His advisor was York (BSc)
George Whitehead, Jr. Massachusetts
In 1956 he joined the Mathematics faculty of the Hebrew Institute of
University of Jerusalem and has been a visiting professor at Stony Technology (MSc,
Brook University since 1989. He has held visiting professorship at PhD)
the University of California, Berkeley (1971, 1985–1986), Awards Nobel Memorial
Stanford University (1975–1976, 1980–1981), and Universite Prize in Economics
Catholique de Louvain (1972, 1978, 1984).[2] John von Neumann
Theory Prize
Mathematical and scientific contribution Harvey Prize in
Science and
Aumann's greatest contribution was in the realm of repeated Technology
games, which are situations in which players encounter the same Israel Prize for
situation over and over again. Economical
Research
Scientific career
 Aumann was the first to Fields Mathematical
define the concept of economics
correlated equilibrium in Game theory
game theory, which is a
type of equilibrium in non- Institutions Hebrew University of
cooperative games that is Jerusalem
more flexible than the Stony Brook
classical Nash equilibrium. University
Furthermore, Aumann has Doctoral George Whitehead,
introduced the first purely
advisor Jr.
formal account of the
notion of common Doctoral David Schmeidler
knowledge in game theory. students Sergiu Hart
He collaborated with Lloyd Abraham Neyman
Shapley on the Aumann– Yair Tauman
Shapley value. He is also
known for Aumann's Academic career
Aumann in 2005 agreement theorem, in Information (https://ideas.repec.org/
which he argues that under
e/pau21.html) at IDEAS / RePEc
his given conditions, two
Bayesian rationalists with common prior beliefs cannot agree to
disagree.[3]

Aumann and Maschler used game theory to analyze Talmudic dilemmas.[4] 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.[5] 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.

Torah codes controversy

Aumann has entered the controversy of Bible 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
Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 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.[6]

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 a long analysis of the experiment and the dynamics of the controversy, stating for example that
"almost everybody included [in the controversy] made up their mind early in the game" Aumann
concluded: "A priori, the thesis of the Codes research seems wildly improbable... Research conducted
under my own supervision failed to confirm the existence of the codes – though it also did not establish
their non-existence. So I must return to my a priori estimate, that the Codes phenomenon is improbable".[7]

Political views
These are some of the themes of Aumann's Nobel[1] lecture, named "War and Peace":[8]

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 of Professors for a Strong Israel (PSI), a right-wing political group. Aumann opposed
the disengagement from Gaza in 2005 claiming that it was a crime against Gush Katif settlers and a serious
threat to the security of Israel. Aumann drew 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.[9] By
presenting an unyielding demand, he claims that the Arab states will 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[1] was criticized in the European press. A petition to cancel his prize garnered signatures from
1,000 academics worldwide.[10]

In a speech to the religious Zionist youth movement, Bnei Akiva, Aumann claimed that Israel is in "deep
trouble" due to his belief that 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.[11]

In 2008, Aumann joined the Ahi political party, which was led at the time by Effi Eitam and Yitzhak
Levy.[12]

Personal life
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, a student
in Yeshivat Shaalvim, was killed in action while serving as a tank gunner in the Israel Defense Forces's
armored corps in the 1982 Lebanon War. Machon Shlomo Aumann, an institute affiliated with Shaalvim
that republishes old manuscripts of Jewish legal texts, was named after him. Esther died of ovarian cancer
in October 1998. In late November 2005, Aumann married Esther's widowed sister, Batya Cohn.[1]
Aumann is a distant relative of the late Oliver Sacks.[13]

Honours and awards

1974: Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences[14]
1983: Harvey Prize in Science and Technology.
1994: Israel Prize for economics.[15]
1998: Erwin Plein Nemmers Prize in Economics from Northwestern University.[16]
2002: The EMET Prize in the Social Sciences category, for Economics[17]
2005: Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (share US$1.3 million prize with
Thomas Schelling).[1]
2006: Yakir Yerushalayim (Worthy Citizen of Jerusalem) award from the city of
Jerusalem.[18]

Publications
1956: Asphericity of alternating knots, Annals of Mathematics 64: 374–92
doi:10.2307/1969980 (https://doi.org/10.2307%2F1969980)
1958: (with J. B. Kruskal) The Coefficients in an Allocation Problem, Naval Research
Logistics
1960: Acceptable Points in Games of Perfect Information, Pacific Journal of Mathematics 10
(1960), pp. 381–417
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, 1994, 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.
2015: (with I. Arieli) The Logic of Backward Induction, Journal of Economic Theory 159
(2015), pp. 443–464

See also
List of Israel Prize recipients
List of Israeli Nobel laureates
List of Jewish Nobel laureates
List of economists

References
1. Robert J. Aumann (https://www.nobelprize.org/laureate/799) on Nobelprize.org
2. "CV (Robert J. Aumann)" (https://www.ma.huji.ac.il/raumann/cv.htm). Einstein Institute of
Mathematics. Retrieved 4 June 2017.
 3. Aumann, Robert J. (1976). "Agreeing to Disagree" (https://doi.org/10.1214%2Faos%2F1176
343654). The Annals of Statistics. Institute of Mathematical Statistics. 4 (6): 1236–1239.
doi:10.1214/aos/1176343654 (https://doi.org/10.1214%2Faos%2F1176343654).
ISSN 0090-5364 (https://www.worldcat.org/issn/0090-5364). JSTOR 2958591 (https://www.j
stor.org/stable/2958591).
4. Aumann, Robert J. (2003). "Risk Aversion in the Talmud" (http://www.ma.huji.ac.il/~raumann/
pdf/Risk%20aversion%20in%20the%20Talmud.pdf) (PDF). Economic Theory. Springer-
Verlag. 21 (2–3): 233–239. doi:10.1007/s00199-002-0304-9 (https://doi.org/10.1007%2Fs00
199-002-0304-9). S2CID 153741018 (https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:153741018).
Retrieved July 29, 2015.
5. Aumann, Yisrael (1999). "B'Inyan Mi SheHayah Nasui Shalosh Nashim" ‫בענין מי שהיה נשוי‬
‫( שלוש נשים‬http://www.ma.huji.ac.il/~raumann/pdf/Man%20with%20Three%20Wives.pdf)
[Regarding One who was Married to Three Wives] (PDF). ‫( מוריה‬Moriah) (in Hebrew).
Jerusalem: Machon Yerushalayim. 22 (3–4): 98–107. Retrieved July 29, 2015.
6. Szpiro, George G. (2006), The Secret Life of Numbers: 50 Easy Pieces on how
Mathematicians Work and Think (https://books.google.com/books?id=qIXl0kEwrVMC&pg=P
A190), National Academies Press, p. 190, ISBN 9780309096584.
7. Aumann, R.H., H. Furstenberg, I. Lapides, and D. Witztum (July 2004). "Analyses of the
'Gans' Committee Report (#365)" (https://web.archive.org/web/20060625075656/http://ratio.h
uji.ac.il/dp/dp_365.pdf) (PDF). Center for the Study of Rationality, The Hebrew University of
Jerusalem. Archived from the original (http://ratio.huji.ac.il/dp/dp_365.pdf) (PDF) on 2006-06-
25. Retrieved 2006-06-20.
8. Robert Aumann's Nobel Prize in Economics lecture (https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/econ
omic-sciences/2005/aumann/lecture/), Stockholm, 8 December 2005
9. Aumann, Robert (July 3, 2010). "Game Theory and negotiations with Arab countries" (http://
www.aish.com/jw/me/97755479.html). Aish.com.
10. "Anti-Israel protests against Nobel prize award" (https://web.archive.org/web/201012152028
11/http://www.ejpress.org/article/4556). Western Europe. European Jewish Press. Archived
from the original (http://www.ejpress.org/article/4556) on 2010-12-15. Retrieved 2010-02-05.
11. Chason, Miri (2006-01-24). "Nobel laureate: Satmars were right about Israel" (http://www.yne
tnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3205817,00.html). Ynet.
12. Hoffman, Gil (9 February 2008). "New party starts 'Anglo' registration drive" (https://web.archi
ve.org/web/20120104091246/http://fr.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost%2FJPArt
icle%2FShowFull&cid=1202246357040). The Jerusalem Post. Archived from the original (ht
tp://fr.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull&cid=120224
6357040) on 2012-01-04. Retrieved 2018-01-13. http://www.eitam.org.il/info_en.asp?
id=2062535187 Archived (https://web.archive.org/web/20080626222319/http://www.eitam.or
g.il/info_en.asp?id=2062535187) 2008-06-26 at the Wayback Machine
13. Sacks, Oliver (14 August 2015). "Sabbath" (https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/opinion/su
nday/oliver-sacks-sabbath.html). Opinion | Oliver Sacks. The New York Times.
14. "Book of Members, 1780–2010: Chapter A" (http://www.amacad.org/publications/BookofMe
mbers/ChapterA.pdf) (PDF). American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Retrieved 27 April
2011.
15. "Israel Prize Official Site – Recipients in 1994 (in Hebrew)" (http://cms.education.gov.il/Educ
ationCMS/Units/PrasIsrael/TashnagTashsab/TASNAG_TASNAT_Rikuz.htm?DictionaryKey
=Tashnad).
16. Nemmers Prize Recipients (http://www.northwestern.edu/provost/awards/nemmers/nemprec
on.html) Archived (https://web.archive.org/web/20060222123808/http://www.northwestern.ed
u/provost/awards/nemmers/nemprecon.html) 2006-02-22 at the Wayback Machine
Northwestern University
17. "The EMET Prize for Art, Science and Culture in the Social Sciences" (http://en.emetprize.or
g/laureates/social-sciences/economics/prof-israel-aumann/).
18. "Recipients of Yakir Yerushalayim award (in Hebrew)" (https://web.archive.org/web/2013102
2034528/http://www.jerusalem.muni.il/jer_main/TopSiteJeru.asp?newstr=3&src=%2Fjer_sy
s%2Fpublish%2FHtmlFiles%2F1030%2Fresults_pub_id%3D12594.html&cont=895).
Archived from the original (http://www.jerusalem.muni.il/jer_main/TopSiteJeru.asp?newstr=3
&src=/jer_sys/publish/HtmlFiles/1030/results_pub_id=12594.html&cont=895) on 2013-10-
22. City of Jerusalem official website

External links
Official homepage (http://www.ma.huji.ac.il/~raumann/)
Robert J. Aumann (https://www.nobelprize.org/laureate/799) on Nobelprize.org

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