Bezalel Peleg was born in the town of Afula located in what was then the British Mandate of Palestine. According to the 1931 census, Afula contained 874 inhabitants and 236 houses. Peleg grew with town, leaving it for the Hebrew University by the time its population had almost quadrupled.
At the University he came to the attention of Robert Aumann. It was 1957 and Aumann, only three years beyond his Ph.D., was an assistant to Shmuel Agmon an authority on partial differential equations. One of Aumann’s duties involved leading what would now be called a recitation section. Three students in the cohort engraved themselves on his memory. The first was Joram Lindenstrauss, who went on to distinguish himself in functional analysis. The second was Micha Perles, who won fame as a geometer. The third was Bezalel Peleg, who became, in Aumann’s words, his first born.
Peleg’s early work was on the notorious von Neumann-Morgenstern stable set (known then as `the solution’). A 1960 paper with Aumann extends the notion of stable sets to co-operative games without side payments and introduces the notion of \alpha and \beta effectiveness. Subsequently Peleg went on to investigate relationships between the bargaining set, the kernel and the nucleolus of co-operative games, establishing a number of important existence and equivalence results. Among these is the 1976 paper with Shapley on the equivalence of all three in convex games.
Peleg went on to make important contributions to the study of general equilibrium in continuum markets and strategic social choice. A specific contribution to the last of these is amusing summarized here. A complete bibliography of his work may be found in a special issue of the International Journal of Game Theory dedicated to him.
Peleg passed away May 9th, 2019, leaving behind a wife, three children and grateful colleagues. We close with a puzzle from him and a coincidence, both of which may be found here.