Lloyd Shapley Prominent American mathematician and economist Date of Birth: 02.06.1923 Country: USA

Biography of Lloyd Stowell Shapley

Lloyd Stowell Shapley, an eminent American mathematician and economist, is an honorary professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has made significant contributions to the field of mathematical economics, particularly in game theory. Since the 1940s, when von Neumann and Morgenstern introduced the mathematical aspects and applications of the theory, Lloyd Shapley has been regarded by many experts as the embodiment of game theory.

Lloyd Stowell Shapley was born on June 2, 1923, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as one of the sons of renowned astronomer Harlow Shapley. He was a student at Harvard when he received a military draft in 1943. Sergeant Shapley joined the United States Army Air Forces in Chengdu, China, and was awarded the Bronze Star Medal. After the war, Lloyd returned to Harvard and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Mathematics in 1948.

After spending a year at the non-profit think tank Rand Corporation, Shapley enrolled at Princeton University, where he obtained his Ph.D. in 1953. His dissertation and other works continued the ideas of English economist Francis Ysidro Edgeworth. Thanks to Lloyd's research, terms such as "Shapley vector" were introduced, and the concept of the core solution in game theory emerged. After receiving his degree, Shapley decided to stay briefly at Princeton before returning to Rand Corporation, where he remained from 1954 to 1981.

In 1955, he married Marian Ludolph, who gave him two sons, Peter and Christopher. Starting from 1981, Shapley became a professor at the University of California. He was the first to consider antagonistic stochastic games for two players and generalized Richard Bellman's equations. This mathematician and economist's name is inseparably linked not only to the Shapley vector and stochastic games but also directly associated with the Bondareva-Shapley theorem, which implies that convex games have non-empty cores.

Shapley is also associated with the Shapley-Shubik power index, a fundamental classical index of influence; the Gale-Shapley algorithm, a marriage matching algorithm; the Aumann-Shapley vector, an extended concept of the Shapley vector for infinite games; the Harsanyi-Shapley lemma and theorem, and more. His early works with R.N. Snow and Samuel Karlin on matrix games were so comprehensive that little has been added to this field since then. Shapley played a crucial role in the development of utility theory and laid much of the foundation for solving the Neumann-Morgenstern stable set problem. Both his works with Michael Maschler and B. Peleg on "cores and kernel" and with Robert Aumann on "non-atomic games" and "long-term competition" have had a tremendous impact on economic theory.

Shapley is a member of the Econometric Society since 1967, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1974, and the National Academy of Sciences since 1979. Since 2007, he has been an honorary member of the American Economic Association.