Amos Tversky was a cognitive and mathematical psychologist whose work fundamentally changed how we understand human judgment and decision making. His collaboration with Daniel Kahneman produced prospect theory and the heuristics-and-biases research program, while his independent work on similarity, measurement theory, and choice models made equally important contributions to mathematical psychology.
Contributions to Mathematical Psychology
Tversky's mathematical contributions extended well beyond prospect theory. His elimination-by-aspects (EBA) model provided an alternative to Luce's choice axiom that could account for similarity effects in choice. His contrast model of similarity challenged the geometric (MDS) approach by proposing that similarity is a feature-matching process rather than a distance metric. His work with Krantz, Luce, and Suppes on Foundations of Measurement helped establish the axiomatic basis for psychological measurement.
Tversky died of metastatic melanoma in 1996 at age 59. Kahneman received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002, noting that Tversky would certainly have shared the award had he lived. The Society for Mathematical Psychology's Tversky Award honors outstanding contributions to mathematical psychology.