Prof. Robert John Aumann (Hebrew name: Yisrael Aumann) joined the mathematics department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1956, and has been there ever since.  In 1990, he was among the founders of the Center for Rationality at the Hebrew University, an interdisciplinary research center, centered on Game Theory, with members from over a dozen different departments, including Business, Economics, Psychology, Computer Science, Law, Mathematics, Ecology, Philosophy, and others. 

Aumann is the author of over ninety scientific papers and six books, and has held visiting positions at Princeton, Yale, Berkeley, Louvain, Stanford, Stony Brook, and NYU.  He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences (USA), the British Academy, and the Israel Academy of Sciences; holds honorary doctorates from the Universities of Chicago, Bonn, Louvain, City University of New York, Bar Ilan University, and Ben-Gurion University of the Negev; and has received numerous prizes, including the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for 2005.

During the last 20 years, Aumann is interested in consciousness. Recently he defined the problem of understanding of consciousness as the last and the most important problem in science today.