David Gale Obituary

This obituary about David Gale, who died earlier this year, is really nice and interesting. A lot of intellectual history related to game theory and market design is in this little piece. I read Roth and Sotomayor's book on two sided matching while I was in grad school. My dissertation was on marriage markets, and I was working all alone on it, so was reading all that I could. It's a huge literature, and I barely made a dent in it, but I did manage to read Roth and Sotomayor's book three times (it took me three times to understand it, I mean). That was the first time I heard of David Gale. The Gale and Shapley "deferred acceptance algorithm" specifically. It was really kind of a breath-taking experience for me to work through that material, and figure out the deferred acceptance model. Even though in retrospect, it's so simple and easy to understand, working through the proofs was really convincing in a way that I don't think it would be otherwise. Roth clearly sees David Gale as an intellectual father figure, and reading this obituary, I was delighted to see that Roth had actually nominated Gale and Shapley to the Nobel Committee for Economics. Once Gale died, then he can't get it posthumously, but Shapley's presumably still on the table.