Lloyd Shapley, a winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences and a UCLA professor emeritus, died Saturday. He was 92.
Shapley was awarded the prize in 2012 for his work in game theory, for which he was considered one of the world’s leading experts according to his peers.
Game theory focuses on maximizing players’ gains compared to their competitors and is often taught using examples such as the prisoner’s dilemma and battle of the sexes.
At UCLA, Shapley taught an undergraduate economics course focused on game theory during the 1990s. He retired from teaching in 2000, but stayed at UCLA as an professor emeritus, where he held office hours in Bunche Hall and the Mathematical Sciences Building.
Shapley was drafted to the U.S. Army Air Corps in World War II and was awarded the Bronze Star after he broke the Russian weather code.
He received a degree in mathematics from Harvard University in 1948 and worked at the RAND Corporation, a think tank in Santa Monica dedicated to research and public policy analysis, for a year afterward.
In 1953, Shapley then earned his Ph.D. in mathematics from Princeton University, where he worked with fellow graduate student John Nash, who later coined the Nash equilibrium.
Shapley’s family has not yet announced funeral arrangements.