Robert Aumann

Robert Aumann was born in 1930 in Frankfurt

Aumann was born in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1930. His family fled to the United States in 1938, shortly before Kristallnacht. In New York he attended a yeshiva high school.

He earned a B.S. in mathematics from the City College of New York in 1950. He then received an M.S. in 1952 and a Ph.D. in 1955 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with a dissertation on knot theory. He did postdoctoral work at Princeton, where he studied game theory.

In 1956 he moved to Israel and joined the mathematics faculty of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His work covered repeated games, correlated equilibrium, common knowledge and the Aumann-Shapley value. With Michael Maschler he used game theory to explain a Talmudic problem of dividing an estate.

In 2005 he shared the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Thomas Schelling. He opposed the 2005 Gaza disengagement and joined the Ahi party in 2008. His political views drew criticism of the prize in the European press.

He married Esther Schlesinger in 1955, and they had 5 children. Their oldest son, Shlomo, was killed in the 1982 Lebanon War. Esther died in 1998, and in 2005 he married her sister, Batya Cohn.