Selten, Reinhard

Selten, Reinhard

(Reinhard Justus Reginald Selten), 1930–2016, German mathematician and economist, b. Breslau, Germany (now Wrocław, Poland), Ph.D. Johann-Wolfgang-Goethe-Univ., Frankfurt, 1961. He taught at the Free Univ. of Berlin (1969–72) and the Univ. of Bielefeld (1972–84) before joining the faculty at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Univ., Bonn; he was professor emeritus there from 1996. An expert in game theory (see games, theory ofgames, theory of,
group of mathematical theories first developed by John Von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern. A game consists of a set of rules governing a competitive situation in which from two to n
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), he refined and extended John F. NashNash, John Forbes, Jr.,
1928–2015, American mathematician, b. Bluefield, W.Va., grad. Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie-Mellon Univ., B.A. and M.A. 1948), Ph.D. Princeton 1950.
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's work on noncooperative games. He shared the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Nash and John HarsanyiHarsanyi, John Charles,
1920–2000, Hungarian-American economist, b. Budapest, grad. Univ. of Budapest (Ph.D., 1947), Stanford (Ph.D., 1959). Harsanyi briefly taught (1947–48) sociology in Budapest before fleeing the Communist regime in 1950 for Australia.
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 in 1994 for their work on game theory, which enabled it to become an important tool in the analysis of economic issues. Selten also made contributions to experimental economics and the theory of bounded rationality.