2005Nobel Prizes

Robert Aumann of the Hebrew University shares the Nobel Prize in Economics.

The prize announced on 10 October 2005 honours game-theory work on conflict and cooperation, shared with Thomas Schelling.

2
laureates share the prize, with Thomas Schelling
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46years
from his 1959 paper to the prize
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10million kronor
prize amount, shared equally
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Here is how it happened.

1938
A boy from Frankfurt reaches New York with his family.
Robert Aumann is born in Frankfurt in June 1930, and the family obtains American visas and emigrates in 1938. He later studies mathematics at the City College of New York.
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1954 to 1956
A problem about decoys turns him to game theory.
At a consulting group in Princeton he is assigned a problem about defending a city from aircraft that are mostly decoys. He recalls what John Nash told him at MIT and takes up game theory.
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Autumn 1956
He takes a job at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
He and his brother had decided to make their lives in Israel after its founding in 1948. He starts as an instructor of mathematics, and writes in his Nobel biography that he has been there ever since.
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1959
He publishes a paper on repeated games that the Nobel Committee later cites.
The paper is titled Acceptable Points in General Cooperative n-Person Games. In his own words it is perhaps the first rigorous treatment of repeated games with some generality.
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The mid-sixties
He joins a US government project on arms control talks.
In his account the project of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency brings together several future Nobel laureates. The reports are published as a book by MIT Press in 1995.
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10 October 2005
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announces the prize.
It goes jointly to Aumann and Thomas Schelling for enhancing the understanding of conflict and cooperation through game-theory analysis. The Academy says Aumann was the first to carry out a full formal analysis of infinitely repeated games.
SourceNobelPrize.org

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Here is why it matters.

Game theory studies choices when each side's move depends on what the others do. Aumann's work on repeated games helps explain why cooperation is easier to sustain in a long relationship than in a single encounter.

2002
Tel Aviv-born Daniel Kahneman wins the Nobel Prize in Economics.
Read the story
2021
Joshua Angrist, an Israeli-American economist, shares the Nobel Prize in Economics.
Read the story
2025
Joel Mokyr, affiliated with Tel Aviv University, shares the Nobel Prize in Economics.
Read the story

Where each fact was read.

Sources read on 1 November 2026.

The story in numbers.

Here is how it happened.

A boy from Frankfurt reaches New York with his family.

A problem about decoys turns him to game theory.

He takes a job at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

He publishes a paper on repeated games that the Nobel Committee later cites.

He joins a US government project on arms control talks.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announces the prize.

Here is why it matters.

Three more milestones to read next.

Tel Aviv-born Daniel Kahneman wins the Nobel Prize in Economics.

Joshua Angrist, an Israeli-American economist, shares the Nobel Prize in Economics.

Joel Mokyr, affiliated with Tel Aviv University, shares the Nobel Prize in Economics.

Where each fact was read.