Steven Brams Scientist
Steven J. Brams (born November 28, 1940, in Concord, New Hampshire) is a game theorist and political scientist at the New York University Department of Politics. Brams is best known for using the techniques of game theory, public choice theory, and social choice theory to analyze voting systems and fair division. He is one of the independent discoverers of approval voting.Brams was a co-discoverer, with Alan Taylor, of the first envy-free solution to the n-person cake-cutting problem.Previous to the Brams-Taylor procedure, the cake-cutting problem had been one of the most important open problems in contemporary mathematics. He is co-inventor with Taylor of the fair-division procedure, Adjusted Winner, which was patented by New York University in 1999 (# 5,983,205). Adjusted Winner has been licensed to a Boston law firm, which formed a company, Fair Outcomes, Inc., that markets several fair-division algorithms.Brams has applied game theory to a wide variety of strategic situations, from the Bible to international relations.
