The year in passings

 This year I noted the following deaths:

Wednesday, November 17, 2021

John Morgan (1967-2021)

Thursday, October 21, 2021

Janos Kornai (1928-2021)

Thursday, September 16, 2021

David Grether, 1938-2021

Saturday, July 31, 2021

Tom Payzant, Boston schools superintendent who reformed school choice, dies at 80

Thursday, July 15, 2021

Hugo Sonnenschein (1940-2021)

Saturday, March 6, 2021

Tom Schelling (who passed away in 2016) gets a Memorial Minute at Harvard

Sunday, February 14, 2021

Margo St. James, (1937-2021) fought to make sex work safer, and legal

John Morgan (1967-2021)

 Here's his obituary from Berkeley Haas, that I learned of only recently:

‘A giant of a person’: Economist John Morgan dies at 53 OCTOBER 29, 2021| BY LAURA COUNTS

"Professor John Morgan, an economist who found elegant new ways to analyze the world through the lens of game theory, and whose popular classes and sage mentorship made a deep impression on his students, passed away Oct. 6 at age 53. He died peacefully at his Walnut Creek home.

"During his nearly two decades at Berkeley Haas, Morgan left his mark through his prolific and wide-ranging research, his unconventional teaching that drew on strategy games he invented, and his generous leadership. He had been struggling with a painful autoimmune disease that put him on medical leave, but he continued with his research and had planned to resume teaching in the spring."

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A paper of his that springs to mind is this one:

... plus shipping and handling: Revenue (non) equivalence in field experiments on ebay, by Tanjim Hossain and John Morgan, 2006, The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy, https://doi.org/10.2202/1538-0637.1429

Abstract: Many firms divide the price a consumer pays for a good into two pieces---the price for the item itself and the price for shipping and handling. With fully rational customers, the exact division between the two prices is irrelevant---only the total price matters. We test this hypothesis by selling matched pairs of CDs and Xbox games in a series of field experiments on eBay. In theory, the ending auction price should vary inversely with the shipping charge to leave the total price paid constant. Contrary to the theory, we find that charging a high shipping cost and starting the auction at a low opening price leads to higher numbers of bidders and higher revenues when the shipping charge is not excessive. We show that these results can be accounted for by boundedly rational bidding behavior such as loss-aversion with separate mental accounts for different attributes of the price or disregard for shipping costs.

Here's his Google Scholar page: John Morgan

Janos Kornai (1928-2021)

 Peter Biro alerts me to the passing of Janos Kornai.

Renowned Economist Kornai Dies Aged 94

and here

Economist Janos Kornai dies

He was a bridge between East and West, between command economies and market economies.  Here's his Google Scholar page: Janos Kornai.

When I met him, he was spending half his time at Harvard and half back in Hungary.  At his retirement dinner from Harvard, someone asked him something along the lines of "what's the biggest difference between Hungary and the U.S.?" He answered that it was how people answered the question "How are you?"  In Hungary, he said, people told you of their complaints, but in the U.S., everyone gave you a big smile and said "I'm fine, how are you?"  He recounted how he thought the American answer was more cheerful, and that he would try to change the equilibrium in Hungary by answering like an American, when in Hungary.  But this didn't work, he said (which is the problem with equilibria...)  When he would reply that he was fine, the response he got was along the lines of "Of course you're fine, you live in the United States!"). So he resigned himself to the fact that equilibria are hard to change...

David Grether, 1938-2021

 David Grether, a pioneer in experimental economics at Caltech has died.

Here's the initial Caltech announcement, promising more to come: 

David Grether, Caltech Frank Gilloon Professor of Economics, Emeritus, passed away on September 12. He was 82.

The paper of his that I remember best (and that I have taught whenever I cover preference reversals) is his incentivized replication of the preference reversals first noticed in hypothetical choice psychology experiments:

Grether, David M., and Charles R. Plott. "Economic theory of choice and the preference reversal phenomenon." The American Economic Review 69.4 (1979): 623-638.

Here are the papers he listed prominently on his web page:

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

"Mental Processes and Strategic Equilibration: An fMRI Study of Selling Strategies in Second Price Auctions" with C. Plott, D. Rowe, M. Sereno and J. Allman Experimental Economics Vol. 10 (2007) pp. 105-122

Sequencing strategies in large, competitive, ascending price automobile auctions: An experimental study with Charles R. Plott  Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization Vol. 71 (2009) pp.75-88 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2009.02.018

The preference reversal phenomenon: Response mode, markets and incentives, with James Cox. Economic Theory 7 (1996): 387-405.

Individual behavior and market performance. American Journal of Agricultural Economics 76 (1994): 1079--1083.

Are people Bayesian? Uncovering behavioral strategies, with Mahmoud A. El-Gamal. Journal of the American Statistical Association 90 (1995): 1127-1145.

Tom Payzant, Boston schools superintendent who reformed school choice, dies at 80

 Tom Payzant played a critical role in transforming Boston's school choice from an immediate acceptance algorithm that exposed students and families to complex strategic risk when navigating the system, to a deferred acceptance algorithm that simplified their participation. As Superintendent of Boston Public Schools, Tom came to understand those issues well, and acted on them.

Here's his obit in the Boston Globe.

Thomas Payzant, whose education vision lifted Boston’s schools, dies at 80, By Bryan Marquard

and here's the statement from Boston Public Schools:

SUPERINTENDENT'S STATEMENT ON THE PASSING OF TOM PAYZANT

Here's a pic I took of Atila Abdulkadiroglu, Parag Pathak, and Tayfun Sonmez when we met with Payzant and his colleagues at Boston Public School headquarters, during the years we worked with BPS, starting around 2003.

Atila Abdulkadiroglu, Parag Pathak and Tayfun Sonmez at Boston Public School headquarters

Here's a paper that came out of those meetings, describing the deliberations that ultimately led BPS to adopt a deferred acceptance algorithm design for it's school choice system.

• Abdulkadiroglu, Atila, Parag A. Pathak, Alvin E. Roth, and Tayfun Sonmez, The Boston Public School Match," American Economic Review, Papers and Proceedings, 95,2, May, 2005, 368-371.

Over the course of those years, I was privileged to watch Parag evolve from a super smart young grad student to being a leader in the design of school choice.

I'll post tomorrow about some of Parag's latest efforts to bring the work associated with the design and evaluation of school choice, and market design more generally, into the world of startup companies and big university labs.

Hugo Sonnenschein (1940-2021)

 A chain of emails originating from U. Chicago brings the news that Hugo Sonnenschein has died.

Along with his many accomplishments as an economic theorist and then as a university administrator, he was a mentor to many, both formally and informally.  

Among the famous economists whose dissertations he supervised (taken from Wikipedia) are  John Roberts, Salvador Barbera, Dilip Abreu, Faruk Gul, Matt Jackson, Vijay Krishna, and Phil Reny.

Here's the list of Hugo's students from the Mathematics Genealogy Project: Abreu, Dilip; Barbera, Salvador; Cho, In-Koo; Dudey, Marc; Fang, Ryan; Fiaccadori, Marco; Gul, Faruk; Krishna, Vijay; Mailath, George; Mardones, Felipe; McLennan, Andrew; Nava, Francesco; Novshek, William; Pearce, David; Reny, Philip; Resende, Jose; Roberts, Donald; Santamaria, Martin; Simon, Leo; Sontheimer, Kevin; Spiegel, Matthew; Vincent, Daniel

The U. Chicago obit is at the link above. Here's Hugo's Wikipedia page that also focuses on his presidency at the University of Chicago. 

Here's Hugo's page at the History of Economic Thought project, which focuses on his contributions to general equilibrium theory and social choice.

Here's his cv.

Before becoming president of U. Chicago, Hugo was Princeton's provost. Some of the changes he instituted at Chicago were controversial among those who feared that they would make Chicago more like Princeton. Here's the Chicago Sun Times on that:

Hugh Sonnenschein, controversial former University of Chicago president, dead at 80.  He drew criticism from students and scholars including Saul Bellow for a university push to expand enrollment and cut the number of required courses to let students take more electives.

 

I first encountered Hugo in his capacity as Editor of Econometrica from 1977-1984.  He was the editor who brought game theory into Econometrica, and so he played a big role in making Economics the principle home of game theory since then.

Hugo Sonnenschein in 2017

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Update: here's a longer, less hurried obit from U. Chicago

Hugo Sonnenschein, 11th president of the University of Chicago, 1940-2021

and here is one from the Barcelona School of Economics:

In memoriam: Hugo Sonnenschein (1940-2021)

Tom Schelling (who passed away in 2016) gets a Memorial Minute at Harvard

 From the Harvard Gazette, March 3, 2021

Thomas Crombie Schelling, 95.  Memorial Minute — Faculty of Arts and Sciences

submitted by Eric S. Maskin, Amartya Sen, Richard J. Zeckhauser, Benjamin M. Friedman

"Thomas C. Schelling taught at Harvard for 32 years, in the Department of Economics and in the Kennedy School. More than any other thinker, Schelling influenced the West’s conceptual approach to the nuclear dangers after World War II. He was an outstanding economist, but ordinary disciplinary boundaries could not contain his fertile mind. Schelling’s contributions interwove theoretical understanding and policy-relevant applications. He laid bare the underpinnings of such problems as nuclear deterrence, racial segregation, smoking, and climate change. Schelling eschewed mathematical expression; he wrote in plain but elegant English. He often developed ideas using examples from everyday life and then applied them to global issues. For instance, he illuminated the architecture of threats and promises first within the family and then in international affairs.

...

"The Nobel Prize committee wrote that Schelling’s insights proved “to be of great relevance for conflict resolution and efforts to avoid war,” and, unsurprisingly, he devoted his Nobel lecture to what he called the “nuclear taboo.”

"As the threat of nuclear war receded, Schelling applied his characteristic approach to other big problems. He analyzed the damage, to both the individual and society, of smoking and other personal addictions. He anticipated future work in behavioral economics and psychology with his working assumption that often what appears to be irrational behavior of an individual is instead a reflection of different aspects of that individual’s self. He probed the problem of racial segregation and showed how easily it can arise even if people have only a tiny preference for their own race. In his final decades, Schelling’s principal focus was climate change. That concern was not new for him; in 1980 he chaired the Ad Hoc Study Panel on Economic and Social Aspects of Carbon Dioxide Increase, under President Carter."

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Previous posts:

Saturday, March 7, 2009

Microstructure of Macro Behavior

Tuesday, December 13, 2016

Tom Schelling (1921-2016)

Margo St. James, (1937-2021) fought to make sex work safer, and legal

 The NY Times has the story

Margo St. James, Advocate for Sex Workers, Dies at 83.  She founded a group called COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics) and devoted her life to the cause of decriminalizing prostitution.

"Ms. St. James sought to reframe prostitution as a profession with legitimate workplace and human rights issues rather than as something sinful. (An ally, Carol Leigh, coined the term “sex worker” in the early 1980s, and Ms. St. James helped popularize it.)

"“There is no immorality in prostitution,” she would often say. “The immorality is the arrest of women as a class for a service that’s demanded of them by society.”

"A media-savvy activist, Ms. St. James invested her crusade with showmanship. She organized an annual Hooker’s Ball, a fund-raising event that celebrated sex workers and drew politicians, police officers and movie stars. The balls reached their zenith in 1978 with 20,000 attendees filling the Cow Palace in San Francisco.

...

"She also established a free health clinic, the St. James Infirmary, which was run by and for sex workers in the Bay Area — one of the first of its kind in the world."

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Here is the St. James Infirmary, "a peer-based occupational health and safety clinic for sex workers of all genders.

"It is our mission to meet the needs of people engaged in the sex trade through advocacy, direct services, and social justice."

Along with providing medical care, they host a "Bad Date List" on their website: "The Bad Date List is a community-based violence intervention tool utilized by sex workers to share information regarding “bad dates.” A Bad Date may be any person who threatens, behaves violently towards, robs, extorts, or engages in any behavior that violates the agreed upon terms and boundaries of the exchange. This list may also be used to report bad encounters with law enforcement."

The year in passings

This year I noted the following deaths with particular significance to readers of this blog:

Monday, December 21, 2020 

Edward (Eddie) Lazear (1948-2020)

Saturday, November 7, 2020

Bernard Cohen (1934-2020), who convinced the Supreme Court that bans on inter-racial marriage were unconstitutional

Thursday, October 1, 2020

Becky Morton, RIP

Wednesday, July 29, 2020

Emmanuel Farhi 1978-2020

Saturday, July 18, 2020

Bill Sandholm (1970-2020)

Sunday, May 31, 2020

What values do we bequeath to our grandchildren? Alberto Alesina et al. on the generations following the Cultural Revolution in China

Sunday, May 24, 2020

Olly Williamson (1932-2020)

Tuesday, April 14, 2020

John Horton Conway (1937-2020)

Edward (Eddie) Lazear (1948-2020)

 My Stanford colleague Eddie Lazear passed away last month, from pancreatic cancer. (When he moved from the University of Chicago to Stanford around 1995 he told me that he moved when he did because he was aware that the academic market for professors became thin after one's 50th birthday.) 

Prominent among his many accomplishments were his studies of labor markets from the inside out, i.e. from the perspectives of workers inside firms.

His papers include

Lazear, Edward P. "Why is there mandatory retirement?." Journal of political economy 87, 6 (1979): 1261-1284.

Lazear, Edward P., and Sherwin Rosen. "Rank-order tournaments as optimum labor contracts." Journal of political Economy 89, 5 (1981): 841-864.

Lazear, Edward P. "Performance pay and productivity." American Economic Review 90, 5 (2000): 1346-1361.

He founded the Journal of Labor Economics, and its current issue, Volume 39, Number 1, January 2021, published just now, contains his most recent paper:

Why Are Some Immigrant Groups More Successful Than Others?

Abstract: "The composition of immigrants depends not only on immigrant choice but also on immigration policy, because slots are rationed. Policy determines immigrant attainment, as evidenced by immigrants from Algeria having higher educational attainment than those from Israel or Japan. Theory predicts and evidence confirms that immigrant attainment is inversely related to the number admitted from a source country and positively related to population and education levels at home. A parsimonious specification has only two variables yet explains a majority of the variation in educational attainment of US immigrant groups. The theory and predictions are bolstered by Swedish data."

Here is the memorial statement from the JOLE (with a link to a special issue in honor of Eddie's 65th birthday: IN MEMORIAM: EDWARD LAZEAR

He was an an influential policy advisor as well as an institution builder.  Here's his Stanford obituary:

NOVEMBER 24, 2020: Trailblazing economist and presidential adviser Edward Lazear dies at 72

Here's a photo I took of him in December 2011 at a conference in honor of the 20th anniversary of the Rationality Center in Jerusalem.

Eddie Lazear (1948-2020)

Bernard Cohen (1934-2020), who convinced the Supreme Court that bans on inter-racial marriage were unconstitutional

 Flags flew at half staff in Virginia last month, marking the death of Bernard Cohen, and also marking how much has changed in Virginia and the U.S. since he argued in the Supreme Court against the Virginia law that forbid inter-racial marriage. (The legalization of same sex marriage was still decades in the future.)

Va. flags to be half-staff Friday in memory of late Bernard Cohen, lawyer in Loving v. Virginia case   by MATTHEW BARAKAT, AP 

"Cohen and legal colleague Phil Hirschkop represented Richard and Mildred Loving, a white man and Black woman who were convicted in Virginia in 1959 of illegally cohabiting as man and wife and ordered to leave the state for 25 years.

"Cohen and Hirschkop represented the Lovings as they sought to have their conviction overturned. It resulted in the Supreme Court’s unanimous 1967 Loving v. Virginia ruling, which declared anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional."

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In a 1963 appeal, the Virginia trial judge declared:

“Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, Malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents, and but for the interference with His arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages,” the judge wrote in upholding the sentence. “The fact that He separated the races shows that He did not intend for the races to mix.”

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Here's the Supreme Court decision 

LOVING  v. VIRGINIA , SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES, 388 U.S. 1

June 12, 1967, Decided

"Marriage is one of the "basic civil rights of man," fundamental to our very existence and survival. To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State's citizens of liberty without due process of law. The Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discriminations. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State.

"These convictions must be reversed."

Becky Morton, RIP

 Becky Morton has passed away after a short illness. She was a pioneer in bringing experimental methods to political science, as an individual investigator, an editor and journal founder, textbook writer, and as an institution builder, who made NYU Abu Dhabi a center of experimental work.

Here's the announcement from NYU:

Mourning the Passing of Rebecca Morton September 27, 2020

"She was an extraordinary academic leader for the development of research and teaching in the social sciences at NYUAD, serving as Associate Dean of Faculty Affairs and Development, Program Head of Political Science, and Global Network Professor of Politics and Economics. Becky was the founding Director of the Social Science Experimental Laboratory at NYUAD, one of her proudest creations. Her unfailing commitment to nurturing early career scholars was epitomized in the postdoctoral program in the social science division, which she led as director until the beginning of fall. Becky’s intellectual engagement with colleagues, students, and our postdoctoral fellows helped forge a lively and successful research community in social science.

"Becky Morton was an outstanding scholar whose work ranged across economics and political science. Committed to interdisciplinary inquiry, she was the author and co-author of four books and numerous articles in prominent economics and political science journals, such as the American Economic Review, American Journal of Political Science, American Political Science Review, Journal of Law and Economics, Journal of Politics, and Review of Economic Studies."

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Here's one of her books:

Experimental Political Science and the Study of Causality: From Nature to the Lab"         By Rebecca B. Morton, Kenneth C. Williams

Here's her editor's introduction to the first issue of the Journal of Experimental Political Science, in 

Welcome to JEPS!,  Journal of Experimental Political Science,Volume 1, Issue 1, Spring 2014 , pp. 1-5, by Rebecca B. Morton  Joshua A. Tucker

In short, she was a force for experiments in political science, despite having a Ph.D. in Economics (and, as I recall, drinking Coke for breakfast).

Emmanuel Farhi 1978-2020

Emmanuel Farhi passed away last week, unexpectedly and tragically.  He was my colleague at Harvard, and we had recently sought to hire him at Stanford.  

Here's the Harvard Economics department memorial, which contains moving testimonials: 

In Memoriam: Emmanuel Farhi 1978-2020 

This has been a hard year at Harvard, with four deaths in the department in the last 12 months.

In Memoriam: Gary Chamberlain 1948-2020

In Memoriam: Alberto Alesina 1957-2020

In Memoriam: Martin L. Weitzman, 1942 - 2019

Bill Sandholm (1970-2020)

The evolutionary game theorist Bill Sandholm has left the game.

Here's the memoriam from the Game Theory Society:
In Memoriam: William H. Sandholm (1970-2020)

And here's the obit from the Department of Economics at the University of Wisconsin, where he spent his career. It lists the cause of death as depression.
In Memoriam: William H. (Bill) Sandholm, leading evolutionary game theorist, cherished mentor and valued colleague

Here's his home page at the University of Wisconsin: Bill Sandholm's Home Page
Here's his Google Scholar page: William H. Sandholm

What values do we bequeath to our grandchildren? Alberto Alesina et al. on the generations following the Cultural Revolution in China

In what is perhaps the last paper he completed before his recent untimely death on May 23 from a heart attack, Alberto Alesina (1957-2020) and colleagues consider how effectively the Cultural Revolution in China in disrupting the old pattern of elites, and of how it looks today in the grandchildren's generation.

Persistence through Revolutions
Alberto F. Alesina, Marlon Seror, David Y. Yang, Yang You, Weihong Zeng
NBER Working Paper No. 27053, April 2020.

The Chinese Communist Revolution in the 1950s and Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976 aimed to eradicate inequality in wealth and education, to shut off intergenerational transmission, and to eliminate cultural differences in the population. Using newly digitized archival data and linked contemporary household surveys and census, we show that the revolutions were effective in homogenizing the population economically and culturally in the short run. However, the pattern of inequality that characterized the pre-revolution generation re-emerges today. Grandchildren of the pre-revolution elites earn 17 percent more than those from non-elite households. In addition, the grandchildren of pre-revolution elites differ in their cultural values: they are less averse to inequality, more individualistic, more pro-market, more pro-education, and more likely to see hard work as critical to success. Through intergenerational transmission, socioeconomic conditions and cultural traits thus survived one of the most aggressive attempts to eliminate differences in the population and to foster mobility.

Olly Williamson (1932-2020)

The great student of transaction costs, Oliver (Olly) Williamson, has died.

Here's the Berkeley obit:
Nobel laureate Oliver Williamson, pioneer of organizational economics, dies at 87

"His multidisciplinary approach to analyzing organizational structures was unconventional in economics at the time—he described it as a melding of soft social science with abstract economic theory. He looked not only at formal firm structure but at culture and social norms. Prof. Ernesto Dal Bó, the Phillips Girgich Professor of Business, called Williamson’s work “a fountain of vocation-shaping epiphanies.”

“After reading his work, we could no longer think of markets, organizations, and legal or political institutions in the same way. And so we didn’t,” Dal Bó said. “His insights are now part of the common sense of social scientists.”
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He won the Nobel prize in economics in 2009: here's his autobiographical statement on the Nobel site. I was struck by this paragraph:

"Although I would not come to appreciate this last until later, there was a major difference between engineering and economics with respect to hypothetical ideals. Thus whereas assumptions of weightlessness or perfect gas laws or frictionlessness etc. served the purpose of simplification in engineering, these assumptions would give way to realities (in the form of friction, resistance, turbulence, and the like) as engineering applications were attempted. In economics, however, assumptions of frictionlessness (of which the standard assumption of zero transaction costs was one) often went unquestioned or, even worse, were invoked asymmetrically. Thus whereas markets were subject to “failures” for which corrective public policy measures were prescribed, there was no corresponding provision for failures in the public sector. A more symmetrical approach would be to recognize that positive transaction costs were the economic counterpart of friction and that all forms of organization experience such costs – albeit in variable degree (depending on the attributes of the transaction to be organized). I credit my engineering background with giving me a receptive attitude toward transaction costs, to include an interest in pinning down and working out the organizational ramifications of such costs."

Rabbi Yeshayahu Haber (1965-2020), who founded "Gift of Life" kidney donor organization

Rabbi Yeshayahu Haber, who founded the Matnat Chaim ("Gift of Life") organization of kidney donors in Israel, has died of coronavirus. He was 55 years old.

YNet has the story:
הרב שהציל חיים נפטר מקורונה (Google Tranlate: The rabbi who saved lives died of corona)

Here's a story in English from Vos Iz Neias? (Yiddish: "What's New?")
Rabbi Yeshayahu Haber, Who Founded “Gift Of Life” For Kidney Donations, Passes Away From Coronavirus

and this from the Jerusalem Post:
'Gift of Life' founder Rabbi Haber passes away at age 55 due to COVID-19

"Haber's funeral will take place at 2 a.m. in Jerusalem. The public is asked not to come to the funeral procession."

GIFT OF Life: Matnat Chaim donors, 2016-2017.

Here are all my posts on Matnat Chaim, which recently recorded its 800th kidney donation.

John Horton Conway (1937-2020)

John Horton Conway, the  John von Neumann Professor in Applied and Computation Mathematics, Emeritus, at Princeton, passed away on April 11, while suffering from corona virus Covid-19.

Readers of this blog likely know him for his theorem that, in Gale and Shapley's marriage model with strict preferences, the set of stable matchings is a lattice with respect to the partial order of the men's common preferences, or the women's, and that these two lattices are the dual of one another. This helped us understand the observation already made by Gale and Shapley that the set of stable matchings included a man-optimal stable matching that every man likes at least as much as any stable matching, and similarly  a woman-optimal stable matching that is  (weakly) preferred by all the women to any other stable matching (and that the best stable matching for the men is the worst for the women and vice versa).

He was a man of wide interests and many theorems. (When I met him once and told him that he was famous in the market design community for his lattice theorem about stable matching, he pretended not to know which theorem I meant.)

Here are some obituaries (which focus on some of his more widely famous accomplishments):

COVID-19 Kills Renowned Princeton Mathematician, 'Game Of Life' Inventor John Conway In 3 Days

""I am sorry to confirm the passing of my colleague John Conway. An incomparable mathematician, a pleasant neighbor, and an excellent coffee acquaintance," Wang tweeted.
...
"Conway's most notable contribution to his field may have been his invention of the Game of Life, leading to the popularization of cellular automaton."
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John Conway Dies From Coronavirus

"According to Princeton University Conway's proudest achievement was the invention of new system of numbers, the surreal numbers—a continuum of numbers that include not only real numbers but also the infinitesimal and the infinite numbers, noting:

"When he discovered them in 1970, the surreals had John wandering around in a white-hot daydream for weeks.

"His surreal numbers inspired a mathematical novel by Donald Knuth, which includes the line:

“Conway said to the numbers, ‘Be fruitful and multiply.’”

"He also invented a naming system for exceedingly large numbers, the Conway chained arrow notation."

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And this, from Scott Aaronson:

John Horton Conway (1937-2020)
"His The Book of Numbers (coauthored with Richard Guy, who himself recently passed away at age 103) made a huge impression on me as a teenager. I worked through every page, gasping at gems like eπ√163 (“no, you can’t be serious…”), embarrassed to be learning so much from a “fun, popular” book but grateful that my ignorance of such basic matters was finally being remedied."

The year in passings

I noted a number of deaths this year (and memorials for earlier passings):

•  Michel Balinski (1933-2019)
•  Alan Krueger (1960-2019)
•  Dr. Oscar Salvatierra, Jr. (1935 - 2019)
•  Special issue of NRL in honor of Uri Rothblum, February 2019
•  Memorial service for Martin Shubik today at Yale
• In Memoriam: Martin Shubik
•  Xenotransplants, Baby Fae, and the complex pioneering efforts of Dr. Leonard Bailey, RIP
• Mark Kleiman (1951-2019)
• Marty Weitzman, 1942-2019
• Ed Green, 1948-2019
• Egon Balas, 1922-2019
•  Who is a refugee? Remembering U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Sadako Ogata

Who is a refugee? Remembering U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Sadako Ogata

The Lancet recalls the life and work of Sadako Ogata, born 16 September 1927; died 22 October 2019.

Sadako Ogata
"Sadako Ogata began to transform UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, almost as soon as she became UN High Commissioner for Refugees in 1991. At the time, the Gulf War had displaced more than a million Iraqi Kurds and thousands were blocked from crossing into Turkey. They were in desperate need just inside the Iraqi border. Ogata quickly sought to expand UNHCR's rules to allow it to provide aid not only to refugees but also to people displaced within their own country. “Most of the senior leaders in UNHCR were against providing assistance to those Kurdish refugees because they were inside Iraq”, said Izumi Nakamitsu, who was based in Turkey at the time for UNHCR and accompanied Ogata on her first mission as High Commissioner to visit the displaced Kurds. “The refugee law says that you're not a refugee until you cross the border and senior officials advised her against providing protection and assistance. But she instinctively felt this was wrong”, said Nakamitsu, who is now a UN Under-Secretary-General and High Representative for Disarmament Affairs. Ogata's insistence that UNHCR provide aid to people who are internally displaced is one of her lasting legacies."
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And from the Guardian:

Sadako Ogata obituary
Independent-minded head of the UN agency for refugees, who expanded its role to help millions more displaced people