Reinhard Selten

Reinhard Selten (born October 5, 1930, Breslau, Germany [now Wrocław, Poland]—died August 23, 2016, Poznań, Poland) was a German mathematician who shared the 1994 Nobel Prize for Economics with John F. Nash and John C. Harsanyi for their development of game theory, a branch of mathematics that examines rivalries between competitors with mixed interests.

Selten’s father was Jewish, and as a result, Selten was forced to drop out of high school after the Nazis came to power. In 1945 he and his family fled Germany and settled in Austria, where he worked as a labourer. Following World War II, he studied mathematics at Goethe University Frankfurt, completing his undergraduate studies in 1955 before earning a master’s degree (1957) and a doctorate (1961).

Selten became interested in game theory in the early 1950s when he read an article about the subject in the magazine Fortune. Refining the research done by Nash, Selten in 1965 proposed theories that distinguished between reasonable and unreasonable decisions in predicting the outcome of games. He taught at the Free University in Berlin (1969–72), Bielefeld University (1972–84), and the University of Bonn (1984–2016). In 1984 he founded the Laboratory for Experimental Economics (BonnEconLab)—the first such laboratory in Europe—at the University of Bonn.

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