Sergiu Hart


Sergiu Hart is an Israeli mathematician and economist, the Chairperson of the Humanities Division of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, and the past President of the Game Theory Society. He is the Kusiel-Vorreuter University Professor, professor of mathematics, and professor of economics, at the Center for the Study of Rationality at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel.

Biography

Hart was born in Bucharest, Romania and immigrated to Israel in 1963. He received a B.Sc. in mathematics and statistics and an M.Sc. in mathematics from Tel Aviv University. His M.Sc. thesis was on the subject of "Values of Mixed Games" and was supervised by Robert Aumann, who was also his advisor in his doctoral thesis on "Cooperative Game Theory Models of Economic Equilibrium".
In 1979–1991 he was at the School of Mathematical Sciences of Tel Aviv University, as professor since 1985. He was an assistant professor at the Department of Economics, Department of Operations Research, and Institute for Mathematical Studies in the Social Sciences at Stanford University, and a visiting professor at the Department of Economics of Harvard University. Since 1991 he is a member of the Departments of Economics and Mathematics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and he was the founding director of the Center for the Study of Rationality there.

Research contributions

His main area of research is game theory and economic theory, with additional contributions in mathematics, computer science, probability and statistics.
Among his major contributions are studies of strategic foundations of cooperation; strategic use of information in long-term interactions ; adaptive and evolutionary dynamics, particularly with boundedly rational agents; perfect economic competition and its relations to models of fair distribution; and riskiness.
Hart edited, with Robert J. Aumann, the first three volumes of the Handbook of Game Theory with Economic Applications.

Awards and honors

Hart was elected Fellow of the Econometric Society in 1985. He was elected Member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities in 2006, Member of Academia Europaea in 2012, and Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2016. Since 2019 he is the Chairperson of the Humanities Division of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities. Hart is a recipient of the Israel Defense Prize, the Rothschild Prize in the Social Sciences, and the Israel Prize in Economics and Statistics.
He was selected to give the Cowles Lecture at Yale University, the Walras-Bowley Lecture of the Econometric Society, the Harris Lecture at Harvard University, the Algorithms, Combinatorics, and Optimization Distinguished Lecture at Georgia Institute of Technology, and the Don Patinkin Lecture at the Israeli Economic Association. He was a member of the First Council of the Game Theory Society, president of the Israel Mathematical Union, executive vice-president of the Game Theory Society, and president of the Game Theory Society.