Daniel Kahneman

Kahneman was born in Tel Aviv in 1934 and spent his childhood years in Paris, France. He and his family lived in Paris when it was occupied by Nazi Germany in 1940, and they spent most of the war attempting to avoid internment. With the exception of his father, who died due to diabetes in 1944, his family survived. The family then moved to British Palestine in 1948, just before the creation of the state of Israel. Kahneman attended the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1954 for psychology and then served in the psychology department of the Israeli Defense forces. In 1958, he traveled to the United States to earn his PhD in Psychology from the University of California, Berkeley. Kahneman then became a lecturer in psychology and collaborated with Amos Tversky to study judgment, decision-making, and prospect theory. Kahneman was ultimately awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002 for his work on prospect theory.