Prof. Yisrael (Robert) Aumann joined the mathematics department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1956 and has been there ever since. In 1990, he was among the founders of the Center for the Study of Rationality at the Hebrew University, an interdisciplinary research center centered on game theory. He is the author of more than a hundred scientific papers and seven books, and has held visiting positions at Princeton, Yale, Berkeley, Louvain, Stanford, Stony Brook, and NYU.

In 2005, he was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.

Prof. Aumann was born in 1930 in Frankfurt am Main, Germany to a well-to-do Orthodox Jewish family. The family fled Nazi persecution and emigrated to the United States in 1938, settling in New York. In the process, his parents lost everything, but nevertheless gave their two children an excellent Jewish and general education. Aumann attended yeshiva elementary and high schools, obtained a bachelor’s degree from the City College of New York in 1950, and a Ph.D. in mathematics from MIT in 1955.

He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences (USA), the British Academy, the Academia Europaea and the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities. He holds honorary doctorates from the Universities of Chicago, Bonn, Louvain, City University of New York, Bar Ilan University, Ben Gurion University of the Negev, and the University of Paris II (Pantheon-Assas). He is married and had five children; the oldest was killed in IDF service in Lebanon in 1982. Also, he has twenty-one grandchildren, and thirty-eight great-grandchildren.