Related to games: CERN and Angry Birds, the world's most widely played (not only) iPhone game, will team up and create a game or games in which Angry Birds will teach quantum physics to the kids. Looking forward to see it. ;-)The Nobel memorial prize for economics went to Lloyd Shapley, a Stanford emeritus professor, a mathematician residing in Cambridge, Massachusetts (I must have met him during a society dinner but I hadn't know him in advance so I probably didn't appreciate it as much as I should have), and a man who is considered to be nearly synonymous with game theory.
He shares the prize with Alvin E. Roth, a current Stanford professor, for "for the theory of stable allocations and the practice of market design".
However, these two men are being admired for many other things, including the Gale-Shapley algorithm to optimally marry \(n\) men and \(n\) women (the recently deceased Rev. Sun Myung Moon, the founder of the Grand Unification Church, was using a highly simplified version of this algorithm applied to \(n\sim O(1,000)\)). However, you see that this is also nothing else than "market allocation" with a romantic twist.
Gordon wrote me:
Finally, a good Nobel choice – Lloyd Shapley for economics.In fact, John von Neumann who inspired Shapley thought that Shapley was brighter than Nash.
He is a son of astrophysicist, Harlow Shapley, and is a fine mathematician.
He and John Nash were friends and competitors at Harvard and at the Rand Corp. He featured quite prominently in Sylvia Nasar's book, "A Beautiful Mind" – interesting book overlooking her unbalanced hatchet job on Yau in "Manifold Destiny".
Many people consider Alvin Roth a genius as well although a Facebook contact of mine has been more critical:
It's interesting to not how the limelight on the economics nobel prize went squarely to a one mr. Alvin Roth – when in fact all he had done was utilize Lloyed Shapely's idea to solve a problem. Incidentally he was not the first person to use that idea - it was very disingenous reporting on the part of the NY Times.Well, please feel free to publicly disagree if you know something about the issues.
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