Thomas Schelling is one of the world's most respected economists. Over his years of study he has dealt with a variety of policy issues, and he is "considered one of the fathers of modern game theory," University President Lawrence Bacow said in an e-mail to the Daily.
Schelling's work garnered him the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 2005.
Schelling grew up in California near Oakland, and received a degree in economics from the University of California at Berkley in 1944. After receiving his Ph.D from Harvard in 1948, he served on the staff of the foreign policy adviser to the president from 1950 to 1953.
He left in 1953 to become a Yale faculty member, and there he published two of his more influential works, "Essay on Bargaining" in 1956, in the American Economic Review and "Bargaining, Communication, and Limited War" in the Journal of Conflict Resolution. Soon after, he became interested in formal game theory.
"[Schelling's] scholarship has influenced everything from nuclear deterrent policy to public policy towards smoking," Bacow said.
Schelling's interest in game theory soon manifested itself in a manuscript describing his own concept of the subject, which he submitted to the Journal of Conflict Resolution.
"It was so long that that Journal decided to make it a whole issue," Schelling wrote in his autobiography on the Nobel Prize Web site. That article spurred Schelling to continue studying the topic, and he soon became interested in how game theory could apply to arms control as the cold war set in.
His "probabilistic threat" theory became very influential, and he focused much of his work on weapons and defense studies. He published two books in 1960 and 1961, titled "The Strategy of Conflict" and "Strategy and Arms Control, 1961," respectively.
In addition, Schelling spent over 30 years as a faculty member at Harvard, where he studied individual decision making and environmental policy, among other subjects.
He left Harvard in 1990 and was appointed Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland in the Department of Economics and the School of Public Policy. In 2005, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences.
Schelling will receive an honorary doctorate of humane letters.
