A couple of months ago, one of the world’s leading game theorists (its unclear whether he would like to be called that anymore, but it is what he is generally considered to be), turned 60. To celebrate the occasion, some of his students prepared a “Festschrift” to his honor. This is definitely not a normal piece. On the contrary! It is presented as a collection of “leaked” documents disclosing various moments in the academic life of Rubinstein. It even has a foreword by Julian Assange (or does it?).
Everything is very nonsensical and completely hilarious. It is academic economist humor at the highest level. So I would really encourage you to take a tour into “The Real Ariel” where we, amongst many things, learn that his career got triggered when he looked for dirty magazines as young. The magazine vendor turned out to be a communist, so he gave the young Ariel some old issues of Econometrica, and pointed to the particularly filthy paper by Arrow and Debreu in the 1954 volume.
I can only recommend having fun with this piece. It even “reveals” that Rubinstein has served as an advisor on a dating site. There, his insistence on using exclusively the male pronoun for clarity created some problems when giving advise to a bisexual: “Chose HIM” (this joke is, of course, a kind nod to the open disagreement between Martin Osborne and Rubinstein in the foreword of their “A Course in Game Theory”)
The document is found on Rubinstein’s personal webpage here (pdf file, 90 Kb). Enjoy!
