Quick Facts
Biography
Steven J. Brams (born November 28, 1940, in Concord, New Hampshire) is an American 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, as well as an extension of approval voting to multiple-winner elections known as Satisfaction approval voting.
Brams was a co-discoverer, with Alan Taylor, of the first envy-free cake-cutting solution for n people. 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.
Education
Brams earned his B.S. at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Politics, Economics, and Science in 1962. In 1966, he earned his Ph.D. in Political Science at Northwestern University.
Career
Brams worked briefly in U.S. federal government positions and for the Institute for Defense Analyses before taking an Assistant Professor position at Syracuse University in 1967. He moved to New York University in 1969, where he is Professor in the Department of Politics. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Rochester, the University of Michigan, the University of California, Irvine, the University of Pennsylvania, and Yale University.
In 1990-1991 he was president of the Peace Science Society (International); in 2004-2006, he was president of the Public Choice Society.
He is a Guggenheim Fellow (1986–87), an American Association for the Advancement of Science Fellow (1992), and was a Russell Sage Foundation Visiting Scholar (1998–99).