LESSONS FROM A WISE MAN


How often does one get to meet or see a Nobel laureate, I am guessing not too often as, I have had the opportunity only once in my entire life so far. It was 16th of January on a pleasant Tuesday morning in the jam packed J N TATA auditorium at the lush green campus of the Indian Institute of Science where the august personality of Robert Aumann had descended to speak on game theory and war and peace. The occasion ofcorse was organized and coordinated by the Innovator’s innovator IBM along with IIMB and IISc keeping up its long tradition of collaborating with leading universities, individuals and teams across the world to stimulate, initiate and innovate.

Robert Aumann was among the founders of the center for rationality at the hebrew university, an interdisciplinary research center, centered on Game Theory. Aumann is the author of well over eighty research papers and six books and has held visiting positions at Princeton, Yale, Berkeley, louvain, Stanford, Stony, Brook, and NYU. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (USA), The British Academy of Arts and Sciences, The national Academy of Sciences(USA), The British Academy , and the Israel Academy of Sciences: he holds Honorary doctorates from the Universities of Chicago, Bonn, Louvain, City college and Bar-llan University: and has received numerous prizes, including the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for 2005.

While driving to the auditorium one question that inevitably crosses most minds crossed mine too- "he is a Nobel laureate, what will his talk be like? Will it all be over my head? However fearing that he could turn out to be like my mathematics teacher at school who could make you stand up any moment and throw a question at you, I did my Homework before the talk and had spent two days googling out information about game theory and also reading up the engineering book that I had not studied. It was at 10:30am when Prof. Aumann took stage and left me surprised when he started with the basic definition of a "game" only to teach the virtue of "humility" to us mere mortals who wouldn’t ever miss an opportunity to use jargon to confuse and impress others. Hence I had already got my first lesson from the distinguished professor.

He then strode into the depth and intricacies of the subject with much enthusiasm and passion with the aid of Overhead projectors and simple hand written transparencies. In a world where audio visuals, lasers, PowerPoint are used to dazzle people with information resulting in entertainment rather than education, our deferential professor preferred the old tools of pedagogy only to reiterate the fact that the good old "class room" type of teaching is still the most effective. And ofcorse it reflected simplicity on his part, which was the second virtue I got to learn.

We were then taken through an enlightening tour of the core of the talk, which was mentally stimulating and very thought-provoking. He enthralled the audience with the application of game theory across fields including politics, war, economics, genetics or even a conversation between two individuals, also consciously or unconsciously displaying his gift for humor and wit while making the entire audience laugh at his satire, witty allusions or funny anecdotes. He then expounded on the work that earned him the coveted Nobel Prize and ended the introduction to his work with these words- " and for this, your humble servant was awarded the Nobel Prize" mesmerizing the audience that was already swept by the magic of his charm.

Robert Aumann was the first to make a comprehensive formal analysis of so-called infinitely repeated games to strategic thinking about "conflict and cooperation" emphasizing on what types of outcomes can be upheld over time in the context of long-run economic relations. Using logic and mathematics to parse the options for co-operation available to people who face the same conflicts over and over again, he showed that cooperation increases when strategic situation are repeated. Even when there are immediate and pressing conflicts of interest, individuals have more opportunities to build co-operation if they expect to be dealing with the other side repeatedly in the future.

He then took questions from the audience and answered every question to the satisfaction of the questioner, dealing with the most stupid and the most intelligent question with equal reverence reminding us of words from a wise man-" there is no stupid question”. There was an incident which is worth a mention here, when a gentleman from the audience asked a question to the professor that was quite esoteric in nature and out of the professor’s knowledge or fields of study, to which the humble genius replied - " when a wise man doesn’t know he says… 'I don’t know’. " teaching a lesson to all of us who at some time or the other in our lives have tried to cook up an answer just to look smart.

The professor then handed out awards to PHd students form IITs and IISc instituted by IBM for excellence in the field of research in science and technology in India. And when the professor left the stage we couldn’t help but give him a standing ovation.