Monday, October 10, 2005
BBC: Game theorists share Nobel prize
They will share a 10m kronor ($1.3m; £723,000) cash prize awarded by the Swedish central bank.
Professor Schelling has specialised in explaining strategies of international conflict, such as nuclear war.
Professor Aumann has developed the theoretical underpinnings of bargaining, co-operation and conflict.
'Totally overwhelmed'
Professor Schelling, 84, a US citizen, is distinguished university professor at the Department of Economics and the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland, and emeritus professor of political economy at Harvard University, where he had taught for 20 years.
Professor Aumann, 75, who holds both US and Israeli citizenship but was born in Germany, teaches at Centre for Rationality at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He and his family fled Germany for the United States in 1938...
He lived to contribute to the world because his family fled in time and managed to get into the US, so they were not killed by the Nazis.
Think what contributions to the world might have come from those six million murdered Jews. Now think of all the others murdered by totalitarian governments over the last century, tens of millions of people, probably at least a humdred million, and those who gave their lives to defeat the evil tyrants. What might they have given the world, had they lived? It is horrible to think how much poorer in all ways we probably are for the political criminality of the last century.
It makes my blood boil that, when after the Cold War's end we had the chance to get back out of the Dark Valley the world entered in 1914, vicious fools seem to want to repeat the Twentieth Century in the Twenty-first, with all its world wars, bloody tyrannies, and genocides. It was so much fun the first time, wasn't it?