Lloyd Shapley (nonfiction)
.jpg)
Lloyd Stowell Shapley (June 2, 1923 – March 12, 2016) was an American mathematician and Nobel Prize-winning economist. He contributed to the fields of mathematical economics and especially game theory.
Since the work of von Neumann and Morgenstern in 1940s, Shapley has been regarded by many experts as the very personification of game theory.
With Alvin E. Roth, Shapley won the 2012 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences "for the theory of stable allocations and the practice of market design."
Shapley returned to Harvard and graduated with an A.B. in mathematics in 1948. After working for one year at the RAND Corporation, he went to Princeton University.
In 1950, while a graduate student, Shapley co-invented the board game So Long Sucker.
He received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1953. His thesis and post-doctoral work introduced the Shapley value and the core solution in game theory.
Shapley defined game theory as "a mathematical study of conflict and cooperation."
After graduating, he remained at Princeton for a short time before going back to the RAND corporation from 1954 to 1981.
His early work with R. N. Snow and Samuel Karlin on matrix games was so complete that little has been added since.
He was instrumental in the development of utility theory, and it was he who laid much of the groundwork for the solution of the problem of the existence of Von Neumann–Morgenstern stable sets.
Many of the ideas he worked on bear his name: the Shapley value, the Bondareva–Shapley theorem (which implies that convex games have non-empty cores), the Shapley–Shubik power index (for weighted or block voting power), the Gale–Shapley algorithm (for the stable marriage problem), the concept of a potential game (with Dov Monderer), the Aumann–Shapley pricing, the Harsanyi–Shapley solution, the Snow–Shapley theorem for matrix games, and the Shapley–Folkman lemma & theorem.
From 1981 until his death, Shapley was a professor at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), serving at the time of his death as a professor emeritus there, affiliated with departments of Mathematics and Economics.
In the News
Game theory matrix credits Lloyd Shapley as "the reason I became a matrix in the first place."
Fiction cross-reference
Nonfiction cross-reference
External links:
- Lloyd Shapley @ Wikipedia