INTERVIEW WITH ROBERT AUMANN
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When I was about twelve, we started reading Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities
together—until the book gripped me and I raced ahead alone. From then on, I
read voraciously. She even introduced me to interactive epistemology; look at
the “folk ditty” in [66]. She always encouraged, always pushed us along, gently,
unobtrusively, always allowed us to make our own decisions. Of course parents
always have an influence, but she was unusual.
I’ve already mentioned my math teacher in high school—“Joey” Gansler. On
the Jewish side, the high school teacher who influenced me most was Rabbi
Shmuel Warshavchik. He had spent the years of the Second World War with the
Mir Yeshiva in China, having escaped from the Nazis; after the war he made his
way to the United States. He had a tremendous influence on me. He attracted
me to the beauty of Talmudic study and the beauty of religious observance.
He was, of course, khareidi, a term that is difficult to translate. Many people
call them ultra-orthodox, but that has a pejorative flavor that I dislike. Literally,
khareidi means worried, scared, concerned. It refers to trying to live the proper
life and being very concerned about doing things right, about one’s obligations to
G-d and man. Warshavchik’s enthusiasm and intensity—the fire in his eyes—lit
a fire in me also. He eventually came to Israel, and died a few years ago in
Haifa.
The next person who had quite an extraordinary influence on me was a young
philosophy instructor at City College called Harry Tarter. I took from him courses
called Philo 12 and 13—logic, the propositional calculus, a little set theory.
H: So your work in interactive epistemology had a good basis.
A: It was grounded in Philo 12 and Philo 13, where I learned about Russell’s
paradox and so on. We struck up a personal relationship that went far beyond the
lecture hall, and is probably not very usual between an undergraduate and a uni-
versity teacher. Later, my wife and children and I visited him in the Adirondacks,
where he had a rustic home on the shores of a lake. When in Israel, he was our
guest for the Passover Seder. What was most striking about him is that he would
always question. He would always take something that appears self-evident and
say, why is that so? At the Seder he asked a lot of questions. His wife tried to shush
him; she said, Harry, let them go on. But I said, no, these questions are welcome.
He was a remarkable person.
Another person who influenced me greatly was Jack W. Smith, whom I met in
my postdoc period at Princeton, when working on the Naval Electronics Project.
Let me describe this project briefly. One day we got a frantic phone call from
Washington. Jack Smith was on the line. He was responsible for reallocating used
naval equipment from decommissioned ships to active duty ships. These were very
expensive items: radar, sonar, radio transmitters and receivers—large, expensive
equipment, sometimes worth half a million 1955 dollars for each item. It was a
lot of money. All this equipment was assigned to Jack Smith, who had to assign it
to these ships. He tried to work out some kind of systematic way of doing it. The
naval officers would come stomping into his office and pull out their revolvers
and threaten to shoot him or otherwise use verbal violence. He was distraught. He
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called us up and said, I don’t care how you do this, but give me some way of doing
it, so I can say, “The computer did this.”
Now this is a classical assignment problem, which is a kind of linear program-
ming problem. The constraints are entirely clear. There is only one small problem,
namely, what’s the objective function? Joe Kruskal and I solved the problem
one way or another [3], and our solution was implemented. It is perhaps one of
the more important pieces of my work, although it doesn’t have many citations
(it does have some). At that opportunity we formed a friendship with Jack Smith,
his wife Annie and his five children, which lasted for many, many years. He was
a remarkable individual. He had contracted polio as a child, so he limped. But
nevertheless the energy of this guy was really amazing. The energy, the intellec-
tual curiosity, and the intellectual breadth were outstanding. A beautiful family,
beautiful people. He made a real mark on me.
Let’s go back to graduate days. Of course my advisor, George Whitehead,
had an important influence on me. He was sort of dry—not in spirit, but in the
meticulousness of his approach to mathematics. We had weekly meetings, in which
I would explain my ideas. I would talk about covering spaces and wave my hands
around. He would say, Aumann, that’s a very nice idea, but it’s not mathematics.
In mathematics we may discuss three-dimensional objects, but our proofs must be
one-dimensional. You must write it down one word after another, and it’s got to
be coherent. This has stayed with me for many years.
We’ve already discussed Morgenstern, who promoted my career tremendously,
and to whom I owe a big debt of gratitude.
The people with whom you interact also influence you. Among the people
who definitely had an influence on me was Herb Scarf. I got the idea for the
paper on markets with a continuum of traders by listening to Scarf; we became
very good friends. Arrow also influenced me. I have had a very close friendship
with Ken Arrow for many, many years. He did not have all that much direct
scientific influence on my work, but his personality is certainly overpowering, and
the indirect influence is enormous. Certainly Harsanyi’s ideas about incomplete
information had an important influence. As far as reading is concerned, the book
of Luce and Raiffa, Games and Decisions, had a big influence.
Another important influence is Shapley. The work on “Markets with a Con-
tinuum of Traders” was created in my mind by putting together the paper of
Shapley and Milnor on Oceanic Games and Scarf’s presentation at the ’61 games
conference. And then there was our joint book, and all my work on nontransferable
utility values, on which Shapley had a tremendous influence.
H: Let’s go now to a combination of things that are not really related to one
another, a potpourri of topics. They form a part of your worldview. We’ll start with
judicial discretion and restraint, a much disputed issue here in Israel.
A: There are two views of how a court should operate, especially a supreme
court. One calls for judicial restraint, the other for judicial activism. The view of
judicial restraint is that courts are for applying the laws of the land, not making