Lloyd Shapley: an intellectual obituary

Here's the link to  my necessarily brief intellectual obituary of Lloyd Shapley, published in Vox EU yesterday:

Lloyd Shapley: A founding giant of game theory

Here are the first paragraphs...:

"Lloyd Shapley was one of the founding giants of game theory. He shared the 2012 Nobel Prize in Economicsfor his seminal work with the late David Gale on stable matching – situations in which there are no two agents who would prefer one another over their current counterparts. But he could have won a Nobel for any of a number of his papers that initiated whole literatures.

In addition to being one of the very first to formulate and study the core of a game, which was intimately related to his work on matching, he invented the Shapley value for evaluating games with side payments, which he and Martin Shubik showed could also be used in studying voting and political processes. He and John Milnor initiated the study of games with a continuum of players (‘oceanic games’), a subject that he later explored in depth with Robert Aumann; his paper on ‘stochastic games’ initiated the study of Markov decision processes as well as Markov games; and he contributed deep insights about learning in games and the structure of markets.

At a time when game theory was viewed as addressing two fairly distinct kinds of situations – cooperative games (in which models focus on what coalitions could accomplish if they agree) and non-cooperative games (which focus on individual players’ strategic choices) – Shapley made fundamental contributions to both."

...

and the last paragraph:

"No brief account can summarise Lloyd Shapley’s intellectual life and career, which was among the most fertile of the 20th century. He opened up vast areas to be explored by those who followed. To pick just an area in which I have worked, a few of his foundational ideas – the core, two-sided matching, and exchange in cycles of trade – have led to the study of matching markets, and to a thriving branch of practical market design, which is the engineering part of game theory."

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Update: That obituary has been reprinted on the Lindau site, here, with this photo by Peter Badge from his ‘Nobel Portraits’ series.:

Dr. Joseph E. Murray, who won a Nobel for the first kidney transplant, RIP

Nobel winner Dr. Joseph Murray, famous for first successful kidney transplant dies in Boston

See my earlier posts about Dr. Murray and the first kidney transplant,

update: here's a good obit in the NY Times:Joseph E. Murray, Transplant Doctor and Nobel Prize Winner, Dies at 93

"Dr. Joseph E. Murray, who opened a new era of medicine with the first successful human organ transplant, died on Monday. He was 93 and lived in Wellesley and Edgartown, Mass."

Richard T. Gill, economist and opera singer

Richard T. Gill, Economist and Opera Singer, Dies at 82

"Mr. Gill, a longtime Harvard faculty member who wrote many widely used economics textbooks, did not undertake serious vocal training (which he began as an anti-smoking regimen) until he was nearly 40.
...
"But after just a few years of study a world-class voice emerged, and Mr. Gill soon forsook chalk and tweed for flowing robes and very large headgear.
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"This was new and dazzling terrain for the author of “Economics and the Private Interest: An Introduction to Microeconomics.”
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"Mr. Gill quit his tenured job at Harvard. He became a fixture at City Opera, singing in a wide array of productions over the next few years.
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"In some respects, he later said, Mr. Gill found the roiling world of opera more appealingly straightforward than the roiling world of academe.
“Performing is a great reality test,” he told Newsweek in 1975. “There’s no tenure in it and the feedback is much less complicated than you get in academia."

Austin Hoggatt: 1929-2009

Austin Hoggatt, professor emeritus at the Haas School, dies at age 79

"Hoggatt served as the director of UC Berkeley's Computer Center from 1961-62. At the business school, he co-founded the Management Science Laboratory with Professor Fred Balderston in 1968 and served as its chairman. Haas School Professor Thomas Marschak said the lab, which was funded by the National Science Foundation, was the first to run computer simulations in game theory and experimental economics with human-to-computer interface.
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"He was a pioneer in computing even before the field of computer science had emerged," said Marschak, who remembered Hoggatt collaborating with German Nobel Laureate Reinhard Selten on experimental economics and with faculty colleagues Julian Feldman and Edward Albert Feigenbaum, who went on to do groundbreaking research in artificial intelligence.
Hoggatt and Balderston co-authored an influential book, "Simulation of Market Processes," that was based on computer simulations they had conducted on the lumber industry. "The book was a breakthrough because this kind of analysis of an entire industry was not possible before the advent of computers," said Marschak."