Short answers, pulled from the story.
Daniel Kahneman received the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for integrating insights from psychological research into economic science, especially concerning human judgment and decision-making under uncertainty. He shared the prize with Vernon L. Smith. Kahneman stated he had never taken a single economics course, crediting his knowledge of the field to collaborators Richard Thaler and Jack Knetsch.
Prospect theory was developed by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky and published in 1979 in the journal Econometrica. It holds that people feel the pain of losses more acutely than the pleasure of equivalent gains, and it became the most cited paper in the history of economics. The final version was more than three years in the making after an early draft was completed in 1975.
Kahneman and Tversky began collaborating in 1969 after Tversky gave a guest lecture at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and published seven journal articles together between 1971 and 1979. Colleagues described them as inseparable during that period. Their collaboration tapered off in the early 1980s following a tension over external credit, though they continued to publish together until Tversky's death in 1996.
The peak-end rule is a cognitive bias identified by Daniel Kahneman stating that people's memory of an experience is determined mainly by how it felt at its most intense moment and at its end, not by the total duration of pleasure or pain. A colonoscopy study associated with Kahneman found that extending the procedure by three minutes of reduced discomfort made patients remember it less negatively and made them more likely to return for follow-up.
Daniel Kahneman died on the 27th of March, 2024, in the municipality of Nunningen, Switzerland, three weeks after his 90th birthday. He received assistance in dying from the Swiss organization Pegasos, a choice shaped by his experience watching his wife Anne Treisman suffer from dementia. The details of his death were not publicly revealed until March 2025.
Kahneman's most famous dictum, which he described as such himself, appears in his 2011 book Thinking, Fast and Slow: "Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it." It describes the focusing illusion, the tendency to overestimate the impact of any single factor on overall happiness because attention to that factor crowds out awareness of everything else.