New Delhi
CNN
—

Daniel Kahneman, who won the Nobel Prize for his pioneering theories on behavioral economics, has died. He is 90 years old.

The Israeli-American psychologist died peacefully Wednesday, according to a release from Princeton University, where he joined the faculty in 1993. A cause of his death was not given.

Kahneman is also the author of a best-selling book Thinking, fast and slow, helped Dispels the notion that people's behavior is driven by rational decision-making, rather than based largely on intuition.

“Danny is a giant in the field,” said Eldar Shafir, a former colleague at Princeton University. “Many areas of the social sciences have not been the same since he came on the scene. He will be greatly missed.”

Kahneman was there Born in 1934 in Tel AvivBut his French parents returned to Paris when he was three months old.

Six years later, when Kahneman finished first grade, the Nazis invaded France and his family was forced to wear the yellow star symbolizing the mass deportation of Jews to concentration camps.

His father, a research chemist, was taken but later released, and the family escaped to unoccupied France and spent the remainder of the war in hiding. His father died in 1944, and the 12-year-old Khanman immigrated with his mother to British Mandate Palestine two years later, shortly before the creation of the State of Israel.

Kahneman studied mathematics and psychology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and earned a Ph.D. At Berkeley, statistics, the psychology of visual perception — why things are the way they are — and how people interact in groups.

Later, at the age of 27, he returned to the Hebrew University to teach statistics and psychology and began his famous partnership with Hebrew University psychology professor Amos Tversky.

In 2002, six years after Tversky's death, Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in Economics For their models of how intuitive reasoning is flawed in predictable ways.

Kahneman integrated insights from psychology into economics, particularly human judgment and decision-making under uncertainty, Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in its quotation At the time.