Ideas have company.
A directory of thinkers and the ideas they developed, discussed, and helped bring into view.
Seed editorial content · attribution review in progressAmos Tversky
Cognitive psychologist and mathematical psychologist whose research explored similarity, judgment, and decision making under uncertainty.
Probability / Behavioral PsychologyAnthony Downs
Economist whose models examined political competition and voter location.
Game Theory / Social DynamicsBenoît Mandelbrot
Mathematician known for fractal geometry and research on scaling, irregularity, and the behavior of financial prices.
Markets & Economics / Complex SystemsCharles Goodhart
Economist whose work on monetary policy is associated with the limits of using statistical regularities as policy targets.
Decision Making / Markets & EconomicsClaude Shannon
Mathematician who founded modern information theory and quantified message uncertainty.
Probability / Information & SignalsDaniel Ellsberg
Researcher and author of Risk, Ambiguity, and the Savage Axioms, a foundational challenge about choices under unknown probabilities.
Risk & Uncertainty / Behavioral PsychologyDaniel Kahneman
Psychologist whose work with Amos Tversky explored judgment under uncertainty and the ways human choices depart from simple rational models.
Decision Making / Behavioral PsychologyDietrich Braess
Mathematician known for a traffic-network paradox about added routes.
Game Theory / Operations & SystemsEdward Lorenz
Meteorologist and author of The Essence of Chaos, whose research helped establish the importance of sensitive dependence on initial conditions.
Probability / Complex SystemsEdward Simpson
Statistician known for a 1951 analysis of how relationships within contingency-table groups can change when data are combined.
Decision Making / ProbabilityElinor Ostrom
Political economist and author of Governing the Commons, known for research on how communities build institutions to manage shared resources.
Complex Systems / Game TheoryFrank Bass
Marketing scientist known for a quantitative model of product adoption.
Markets & Economics / Social DynamicsFrank Benford
Physicist associated with the leading-digit law in scale-spanning data.
Probability / Information & SignalsGene Amdahl
Computer architect known for the limits of parallel speedup.
Information & Signals / Operations & SystemsGeorge Akerlof
Economist and coauthor of Animal Spirits, known for studying asymmetric information and quality uncertainty in The Market for Lemons.
Markets & Economics / Behavioral PsychologyGeorge Zipf
Linguist known for rank-frequency regularities in language.
Probability / Information & SignalsGordon Tullock
Economist whose contest models examined costly competition for fixed prizes.
Markets & Economics / Game TheoryHarold Hotelling
Statistician and economist known for models of spatial competition and consumer choice across locations.
Markets & Economics / Game TheoryHermann Ebbinghaus
Psychologist and author of Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology, a pioneering experimental investigation of learning and forgetting.
Behavioral PsychologyJacob Bernoulli
Mathematician and author of Ars Conjectandi, which included an early proof of the law of large numbers for repeated binary trials.
ProbabilityJay Forrester
Systems scientist who studied industrial feedback and supply-chain dynamics.
Complex Systems / Operations & SystemsJoel Huber
Consumer researcher who coauthored early work on asymmetric dominance in choice.
Markets & Economics / Behavioral PsychologyJohn D. C. Little
Operations researcher who proved the queueing relation L=λW.
Markets & Economics / Operations & SystemsJohn L. Kelly Jr.
Researcher at Bell Labs associated with information theory and a mathematical approach to capital allocation under repeated risk.
Risk & Uncertainty / Markets & EconomicsJohn Maynard Keynes
Economist and author of The General Theory, which used a beauty-contest metaphor to explain choices driven by expectations about others.
Markets & Economics / Game TheoryJohn Nash
Mathematician whose work formalized non-cooperative equilibrium and axiomatic bargaining, central tools for analyzing strategic interaction.
Decision Making / Game TheoryMartin Gardner
Mathematics writer who introduced the game of googol to a broad audience.
Decision Making / ProbabilityMaurice Allais
Economist whose lottery choice problems challenged a standard axiom of expected utility theory.
Risk & Uncertainty / Decision MakingNassim Nicholas Taleb
Essayist and researcher whose work examines uncertainty, rare events, and the fragility of systems. His writing brings questions of survival and risk into everyday decision making.
Risk & Uncertainty / Complex SystemsPaul Milgrom
Economist and author of Putting Auction Theory to Work, known for research on auctions, information and market design.
Markets & Economics / Game TheoryPierre François Verhulst
Mathematician associated with logistic population growth.
Complex Systems / Ecology & GrowthRichard Thaler
Economist and author of Misbehaving and coauthor of Nudge, known for bringing psychological evidence into economics, including mental accounting and self-control.
Decision Making / Behavioral PsychologyRobert Axelrod
Political scientist and author of The Evolution of Cooperation, whose tournaments explored reciprocal strategies in repeated social dilemmas.
Decision Making / Game TheorySushil Bikhchandani
Economist and coauthor of influential research on informational cascades and the fragility of social learning from observed actions.
Behavioral Psychology / Game TheoryThomas Schelling
Economist and author of Micromotives and Macrobehavior and The Strategy of Conflict, known for studying how individual decisions generate collective outcomes.
Complex Systems / Game TheoryVilfredo Pareto
Economist associated with mathematical studies of uneven distributions.
Probability / Markets & EconomicsVito Volterra
Mathematician who modeled interacting predator and prey populations.
Complex Systems / Ecology & GrowthW. Brian Arthur
Complexity economist known for the El Farol bar problem.
Game Theory / Social DynamicsWarder Clyde Allee
Ecologist who studied how cooperation and density can affect population growth.
Complex Systems / Ecology & GrowthWilliam Kermack
Mathematician who co-developed influential epidemic models with Anderson McKendrick.
Complex Systems / Ecology & GrowthWilliam R. Thompson
Statistician whose probability-matching work influenced bandit algorithms.
Decision Making / Information & SignalsWilliam Stanley Jevons
Economist whose study of coal examined how efficiency can expand use.
Markets & Economics / Ecology & GrowthWilliam Vickrey
Economist known for auction theory and incentive design, including the second-price sealed-bid auction.
Markets & Economics / Game Theory