Robert J. Aumann

Brief Biography

Robert J. Aumann is a Nobel prize-winning Israeli-American mathematician who has made significant contributions to the theory of games. When he was eight years old, he and his family fled his native Germany to the United States three months before the Kristallnacht pogrom. He attended a Jewish high school in New York City before enrolling at the City College of New York in 1947. He earned his BS in Mathematics and pursued graduate study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

A year before receiving a PhD in mathematics from MIT, Aumann took a job at Princeton University’s Analytical Research Group, located in the Forrestal Research Center. It was here that he first saw operations research in action; inter alia, he worked on an urban air defense problem. When considering with which method to approach the problem, Aumann recalled conversations that he’d had with MIT mathematician John Nash and realized that game theory offered the best solution. Through this encounter, he developed and fostered an interest in the subject that would define his career.

Aumann was already identified as a game theorist by the time he joined the Mathematics Department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1956. He has since held visiting appointments at Princeton University, Yale University, the University of California at Berkeley, Stanford University, the Catholic University of Louvain, Stony Brook University, and Tel Aviv University. At Tel Aviv, he supervised the master's thesis of future Mathematics of Operations Research chief editor, Uriel G. Rothblum. 

In the realm of game theory, some of Aumann’s most significant contributions pertain to repeated games, where players encounter the same interactive situation multiple times. He defined correlated equilibrium, a type of equilibrium in non-cooperative games that is more flexible than the classical Nash equilibrium. His book (co-authored with Michael Maschler), Repeated Games with Incomplete Information (1995), was awarded the Frederick W. Lanchester Prize. In 2005 Aumann was awarded the John von Neumann Theory Prize for life long contributions to game theory, which he views as a unified approach to interactive disciplines such as economics, political science, international relations, law, business and public administration, evolutionary biology and parts of computer science. He was recognized for a number of developments, including modeling economies with “many” agents as continua, formalizing the notion of common knowledge, laying the foundations of repeated games, and developing an axiomatic foundation for the subjective quantification of uncertainty.

In the year of his von Neumann Prize, Aumann shared the Nobel Prize in Economics with Thomas C. Schelling “for having enhanced our understanding of conflict and cooperation through game-theory analysis.” In his prize lecture, Aumann touched upon a number of themes dealing with the theory of games in conflict study. He urged that war be scientifically studied in order to be understood, and so, eventually prevented. He pointed out that repeated games—long term interactions—are more likely to result in cooperative outcomes than one-shot interactions. His boldest claim was that credible war threats and mutually assured destruction more reliably prevent war than does traditional peacemaking. Aumann has made a number of other geopolitical observations, citing the Blackmailer Paradox and other game-theoretic ideas in analyzing the Arab-Israeli and other conflicts.

Aumann has been active in a number professional organizations, serving as president of the Game Theory Society and the Israel Mathematics Union. He is an elected fellow of the Econometric Society, and a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Israel Academy of Sciences, and the British Academy. 

Other Biographies

Wikipedia Entry for Robert Aumann

Hebrew University of Jerusalem Einstein Institute of Mathematics. Robert J. Aumann Brief Biography. Accessed April 21, 2015. (link)  

Jewish Virtual Library. Biography: Robert Aumann. Accessed April 21, 2015. (link)

UBS Nobel Perspectives.  Robert Aumann - Can game theory end world conflict?  Accessed April 25, 2019 (link) 

Robert J. Aumann (2006) Interview by Pelle Guldborg Hansen. July 13, Stony Brook, NY.  In Hendricks VF & Hansen PG (eds), Game Theory, 5 Questions, Automatic Press 2007, pp 1-7 (preprint) 

Robert J. Aumann (2008) Interview by Adam Smith. August 20. Video. Lindau, Germany. (video) 

Hart, Sergiu (2005) An Interview with Robert Aumann.  Macroeconomic Dynamics 9, 2005, 683-740. (link)