(posted by Rakesh Vohra, 13 March 2016)
The Nobel laureate Lloyd Shapley passed away on March 12, 2016. He was of the `heroic age’ of Game Theory that gave us, among others, Gale, Nash, Scarf, and Kuhn. You will find his memorial among the many eponymous concepts, models and theorems that pave the subject: the Shapley value, the Shapley-Shubik assignment model, The Gale-Shapley algorithm, the Shapley-Folkman Theorem, the Bondareva-Shapley Theorem, Aumann-Shapley pricing and the Scarf-Shapley housing model. The list just enumerated is biased towards Shapley’s contributions to co-operative games and matching. On the noncooperative side there is the introduction of stochastic games, the introduction (joint with Monderer) of Potential games and with Aumann a folk theorem for infinitely repeated games. Even until the onset of dementia some years ago, Shapley continued to `bang away’ as it were, most recently with the von-Neumann Morgenstern solution. His breadth and fecundity are unrivaled. For this the Society honors him at each World Congress through the Shapley Lecture which is given by a distinguished game theorist aged 40 or under at the time of the Lecture.
Shapley was, until recently, a regular of the Society’s meetings at Stony Brook as well as the World Congress. He was no wallflower and could be heard asking pointed questions, and directing others to his less well known work on, say, accessibility of fixed points.
Shapley also delighted in playing games, having invented (along with Nash, Hausner and Shubik) the game `so long sucker’. At conferences, Shapley would hold forth on how Kriegspiel (blindfold chess) is to be played rationally, though less enlightened souls reported he lost that way. He will be missed.