Daniel Kahneman dies at 90: 10 things to know about the Nobel Prize winner

Daniel Kahneman passes away: Daniel Kahneman received a bachelor’s degree in psychology from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 1954.

Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman, a pioneer in behavioral economics, died at age 90. The Israeli-American academic Kahneman worked at the Princeton University until his death. The institution confirmed his passing in a statement on its website as a former colleague and professor Eldar Shafir in a press release, “Many areas in the social sciences simply have not been the same since he arrived on the scene. He will be greatly missed.”

Daniel Kahneman passes away: Economist and psychologist Daniel Kahneman (File)

Here are ten things you need to know about Daniel Kahneman:

1. Daniel Kahneman was born on March 5, 1934, in Tel Aviv. His family lived in France and had emigrated there from Lithuania. His father, a Jewish chemist, was arrested because of his religion during World War II and then released. Following the war, the family moved to Palestine.
2. Daniel Kahneman received a bachelor’s degree in psychology from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 1954.
3. He received a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley in 1961.
4. After this he returned to the Hebrew University to teach in the psychology department. Read more: Xi Jinping meets US company CEOs in Beijing: Apple's Tim Cook not invited? Who was present?
5. In 2002, Daniel Kahneman was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his research psychology and economics.
6. He also opposed traditional economic approaches that people were fully rational and self-interested and argued that people have mental biases that can distort their judgments.
7. In 1993, he moved to Princeton University in New Jersey, where he was a psychology professor and taught at Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.
8. In a 2012 interview, Daniel Kahneman said, “People are designed to tell the best story possible. We don’t spend much time saying, ‘Well, there is much we don’t know.’ We make do with what we do know.”
9. Talking about his collaborator Tversky, who worked with him for over a decade in his Nobel Prize-winning work, he said, "Amos and I shared the wonder of together owning a goose that could lay golden eggs — a joint mind that was better than our separate minds. I have probably shared more than half the laughs of my life with Amos.”
10. Harvard University professor Steven Pinker told the Guardian in 2014 that Daniel Kahneman was “the world’s most influential living psychologist. His work is really monumental in the history of thought.”