Robert Aumann

Robert John Aumann, also known as Yisrael Aumann (born 8 June 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 at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, holds a visiting position at Stony Brook University and is one of the founding members of the Stony Brook Center for Game Theory. He received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2005 for his work on conflict and cooperation through game theory analysis, sharing it with Thomas Schelling. Born in Frankfurt am Main, he fled to the United States with his family in 1938, two weeks before the Kristallnacht pogrom, graduated from the City College of New York in 1950, and took his doctorate in mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1955 under George Whitehead Jr., with a dissertation on knot theory.