Lloyd Shapley

Lloyd Shapley (June 2, 1923 – March 12, 2016) was an American mathematician and economist renowned for his pioneering contributions to game theory, particularly the development of the Shapley value for fairly distributing gains in cooperative games and the Gale-Shapley algorithm for stable matchings in two-sided markets, work that earned him the 2012 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, shared with Alvin E. Roth.

Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Shapley was the son of astronomer Harlow Shapley and Martha Betz, growing up in an intellectually stimulating environment influenced by his father's work at Harvard College Observatory. He attended Phillips Exeter Academy before enrolling at Harvard University as a mathematics major in 1940, though his studies were interrupted by World War II; he served in the U.S. Army Air Corps from 1943 to 1945, earning a Bronze Star for his cryptographic work in weather forecasting. Returning to Harvard, he completed his A.B. in 1948 and then pursued a Ph.D. at Princeton University, earning it in 1953 with a dissertation on additive and non-additive set functions under advisor Albert W. Tucker.