Daniel Kahneman

He tied the nuptial knot with Anne Treisman, who too serves as a professor of psychology at Princeton University. She is a Royal Society fellow and award-winning cognitive psychologist.

Daniel Kahneman was born on March 5, 1934 in Tel Aviv when his mother was on a trip to her relatives’ place. His parents, originally from Lithuania, were settled in Paris, France where young Kahneman spent much of his early years.

In 1940, the Paris was occupied by the Nazi Germany and from then on difficult times started for the Kahneman family. His father was arrested but was later released due to the intervention of his employer. The family was constantly on run till the end of the Second World War and during this time Daniel’s father succumbed to diabetes in 1944.

In 1948, the family moved to British Mandatory Palestine, just before the creation of the state of Israel.

Completing his preliminary education, he enrolled at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem from where he graduated in 1954 with a Bachelor degree in Science, majoring in psychology with mathematics as a minor subject.

Attaining his graduate degree, he was drafted into the Israeli Defense Force, where he worked in the psychology department. His profile included evaluating candidates for the officer training program in school and developing test to gauge the candidates suitability for the purpose.

Concluding his studies, he returned to his alma mater, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he took up an academic position as a lecturer of psychology in 1961. Within a span of five year, he was promoted to the rank of senior lecturer.

Other than pursuing his academic career, he continued with research and came up with his first work, which was published in the prestigious journal ‘Science’ as ‘Pupil Diameter and Load on Memory’. In it, he dealt with visual perception and attention.

Meanwhile, in addition to his academic position at Hebrew University, he also worked as a visiting scientist at the University of Michigan from 1965 to 1966 and at the department of Applied Psychology Research Unit in Cambridge. He served as the fellow at the Center for Cognitive Studies and as a lecturer in psychology at Harvard University in 1966/1967.

His association with Amos Tversky dates back to his time at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, during which he had invited the latter for a guest lecture. The two collaborated together and came up with their first jointly written paper ‘Belief in the Law of Small Numbers’ which was published in 1971.

Over the years, from 1971 to 1979, the duo came up with seven more articles in the field of judgement and decision-making, each of which was published in reputed journals.

In 2002, he was conferred with the prestigious and highly-esteemed Nobel Memorial Prize in economics for his work on ‘Prospect Theory’. He shared this award with Amos Tversky.

In 2003, he along with Tversky was awarded the University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for Psychology.

The American Psychological Association bestowed upon him the Outstanding Lifetime Contributions to Psychology Award in 2007.

The Department of Economics at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam, Netherlands awarded him with an honorary doctorate on November 6, 2009.

For two years consecutively in 2011 and 2012, he was listed under Bloomberg 50 most influential people in global finance