Oskar Morgenstern

Oskar Morgenstern (January 24, 1902 – July 26, 1977) was a German-born economist.

In collaboration with mathematician John von Neumann, he founded the mathematical field of game theory as applied to the social sciences and strategic decision-making (see von Neumann–Morgenstern utility theorem).

Companies he served as founder/co-founder of included Market Research Corporation of America, Mathematica and Mathematica Policy Research.

Morgenstern was born in Görlitz in the Prussian Province of Silesia.

His mother was said to be a daughter of Emperor Frederick III of Germany.

Morgenstern grew up in Vienna, Austria, where he also went to university.

In 1925, he graduated from the University of Vienna and got his PhD in political science.

From 1925 until 1928, he went on a three-year fellowship financed by the Rockefeller Foundation.

After his return in 1928, he became a professor in economics at the University of Vienna until his visit to Princeton University in 1938.

He also worked as an outside expert for the Economic and Financial Organization of the League of Nations, together with Bertil Ohlin and Jacques Rueff, supporting the EFO's work on economic depressions in the late 1930s.

During Morgenstern's visit to Princeton University, Adolf Hitler took over Vienna during the Anschluss, and Morgenstern decided to remain in the United States.

He became a member of the faculty at Princeton but gravitated toward the Institute for Advanced Study.

In 1935, Morgenstern published the article Perfect Foresight and Economic Equilibrium, after which his colleague Eduard Čech pointed him to an article of John von Neumann, Zur Theorie der Gesellschaftsspiele (1928).

There, he met von Neumann and they collaborated to write Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, published in 1944, which is recognized as the first book on game theory, a mathematical framework for the study of strategic structures which govern rational decision-making in certain economic, political, and military situations.

In 1944, Morgenstern also became a United States citizen, and four years later he married Dorothy Young, with whom he had two children, Carl and Karin.

In 1950, he was elected as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association.

In the late 1950s "Oskar Morgenstern and several of his Princeton University colleagues" began a "small research organization."

Company names with which he, along with others, were involved as founders/co-founders included:

Morgenstern remained at Princeton as a professor of economics until his retirement in 1970, at which time he joined the faculty of New York University.

Morgenstern wrote many other articles and books, including On the Accuracy of Economic Observations, and Predictability of Stock Market Prices with subsequent Nobel laureate Clive Granger.

Morgenstern died in Princeton, New Jersey in 1977.

The archive of his published works and unpublished documents is held at Duke University.

In November 2012 a place in Alsergrund, Vienna was called "Oskar-Morgenstern-Platz"; it is the address of the Faculties of Economics and of Mathematics of the University of Vienna.

In 2013, the University of Vienna relocated the Faculty of Business, Economics and Statistics and named the square Oskar-Morgenstern-Platz in his honor.

The collaboration between economist Morgenstern and mathematician von Neumann led to the birth of entirely new areas of investigation in both mathematics and economics.

These have attracted widespread academic and practical interest since that time.