Daniel Kahneman

Kahneman began mapping the systematic errors hardwired into human judgment, working with Tversky to identify the heuristics and biases that trip up even careful thinkers. The pair developed prospect theory, a new model for how people actually weigh risk and reward. That work earned him the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, shared with Vernon L. Smith, making him the rare psychologist to claim the honor. By then he was professor emeritus at Princeton's School of Public and International Affairs and had cofounded TGG Group. In 2011 he published Thinking, Fast and Slow, distilling decades of research into a bestseller that made him a public intellectual beyond the academy. He was married to cognitive psychologist Anne Treisman until her death in 2018. He died in March 2024, six years after Foreign Policy named him a top global thinker and The Economist ranked him the seventh most influential economist alive.