When photographer Reed Saxon got a call early Monday morning from his AP editor alerting him to the news that fellow Palisadian Lloyd Shapley had just been named co-winner of the Nobel prize in economics, he and photojournalist Jonathan Alcorn drove up to Professor Shapley’s house on Alcima to photograph the distinguished mathematician. ’It was about 6 a.m. and still dark when we arrived at the house, which was at the end of a long driveway,’ Saxon told the Palisadian-Post. ‘I rang the doorbell once and there was no answer. I rang a second time and was ready to give up and walk away when Professor Shapley answered the door. I asked him if he had gotten the phone call [from Sweden] and heard the good news. He was pretty groggy; he told me he had a hearing problem, so he didn’t quite understand me. When it finally sank in, I handed him my phone so that our reporter downtown could interview him. Although I couldn’t hear what our reporter was asking, Professor Shapley perked up when he started talking about math.’ Shapley, 89, and co-winner Alvin Roth, 60, were lauded for their separate studies on the matchmaking that takes place when doctors are coupled with hospitals, students with schools and human organs with transplant recipients. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences noted in announcing the prize that ‘the work of Roth and Shapley has sparked a flourishing field of research and helped improve the performance of many markets.’ Winners are awarded 8 million Swedish kronor, or about $1.2 million. ’We are delighted that after decades of hard work and numerous significant contributions to the field of game theory, our father has been honored with the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Studies,’ said Shapley’s sons, Peter and Christopher. ‘We know he is tremendously thankful that his life’s work is being recognized with such a prestigious award and grateful for the many congratulations expressed by colleagues and friends.’ Shapley, 89, used game theory to research different matching systems and to answer how one method may systematically benefit one agent or another in markets. A mathematician long associated with game theory and now professor emeritus at UCLA, he made some of the earliest theoretical contributions to research on market design and matching, in the 1950s and 1960s. In a paper with David Gale in 1962, Shapley explained how individuals can be paired together in a stable match even when they disagree about what qualities make the right match. The paper focused on designing an ideal, perfectly stable marriage market: having mates find one another in a fair way, so that no one who is already married would want (and be able) to break off and pair up with someone else who is already married. Shapley, who was born and raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts (his father was a renowned astronomer at Harvard), received a bachelor’s degree from Harvard and a Ph.D. in mathematics at Princeton, where for a time he mentored John Nash, a future Nobel laureate. He became a joint professor of math and economics at UCLA in 1981, hired by Acting Department Chair Al Hales’who lived in Pacific Palisades.
This page is available to subscribers. Click here to sign in or get access.
