Israeli professor awarded Nobel Prize in Stockholm

by Tamara Traubman
11/12/2005
Ha'aretz

At the yeshiva high school where he studied, he was told 
he was not very good in mathematics, and they advised him 
to choose something simpler, like auto mechanics. 
But on Thursday, Professor Robert Aumann received the Nobel 
Prize in Economics for his mathematical research into game 
theory, together with American Thomas Schelling.

Aumann, a professor at Hebrew University, received the 
$1.3 million prize from the hand of Sweden's king at a 
ceremony in Stockholm. Following the ceremony, the 
recipients were hosted at a festive dinner attended by diplomats, 
politicians, businessmen and members of the royal family.

Aumann arrived in Sweden with his 35 children, grandchildren 
and great-grandchildren, as well as his new bride, Batya, 
the sister of his deceased first wife.

"We had tears in our eyes," said his son, Yonatan. "It doesn't 
matter that we've known for a long time already; the excitement 
was enormous."

According to the official announcement, Aumann and Schelling 
received the prize "for having enhanced our understanding of 
conflict and cooperation through game-theory analysis."

In remarks during the ceremony, the judges elaborated on this, 
crediting Aumann with having shown that when a particular 
situation repeats itself, the very fact that it does so provides 
opportunities for cooperation, even between parties to a conflict.

"War is not irrational," Aumann said earlier last week, adding 
that military preparedness is the best way to prevent war. 
"During the long, dark days of the Cold War, peace was 
maintained because airplanes carrying nuclear weapons were 
in the air 24 hours a day."

Two of Aumann's relatives went to Stockholm a week early 
to ensure that the arrangements would meet the Orthodox 
prize winner's religious requirements. In addition to arranging 
kosher food, they had to ensure that his tuxedo did not 
contain a forbidden mixture of linen and wool and rent a room 
near the hall where the ceremony would take place so that 
he would be able to set out after the end of Shabbat and 
still arrive on time.

At the ceremony, awards were handed out to the prize winners 
not only in economics, but also in medicine, physics, chemistry 
and literature. In medicine, the award went to Australians Barry 
Marshall and Robin Warren for proving that ulcers were caused 
by bacteria rather than stress. The literature prize went to British 
playwright Harold Pinter, who is ill with cancer and was therefore 
unable to attend, but gave a prerecorded speech in which he 
attacked U.S. President George Bush and British Prime Minister 
Tony Blair over the war in Iraq. 

Mohamed ElBaradei and the International Atomic Energy Agency, 
of which he is the director general, jointly received the Nobel Peace 
Prize earlier Thursday. In his acceptance speech, ElBaradei 
said that if the world is to survive, there is no place for nuclear 
weapons in it. Therefore, he said, we must ensure both that 
no country obtains nuclear weapons, and that those that already 
have them, destroy them.

Peace prize awards are often controversial, and this year's was 
no exception: The Greenpeace organization demonstrated both 
Friday and Thursday against the award to the IAEA, arguing 
that even nonmilitary uses of atomic energy, which it is the 
agency's job to promote, ought to be banned, as nuclear energy 
is dangerous both to the environment and to human beings.

However, it is rare for the scientific prizes to arouse controversy. 
Thus the opposition to Aumann and Schelling's award was 
exceptional: Close to 1,000 people, including several dozen 
Israelis, signed a petition proclaiming it "monstrous" to award 
a Nobel prize to "two war-mongers."

The petition charged that the theory developed by Schelling 
encouraged the use of military force and helped inspire the 
U.S. bombing campaign during the Vietnam War, and it 
accused Aumann, who is right of center politically and belongs 
to the rightist organization Professors for a Strong Israel, of 
using game theory to justify Israeli control over the territories.

Last year, two Israelis, Professors Aaron Ciechanover and 
Avram Hershko, won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. In 2002, 
Professor Daniel Kahneman, an Israeli working at Princeton 
University, was one of the winners of the economics prize.