German mathematician who shared the 1994 Nobel Prize for Economics with John F. Nash (Nash, John F., Jr.) and John C. Harsanyi (Harsanyi, John C.) for their development of game theory, a branch of mathematics that examines rivalries among competitors with mixed interests.

The son of a bookseller, Selten studied mathematics at the University of Frankfurt and graduated in 1957. He became interested in game theory in the late 1940s when he read an article about the subject in the magazine Fortune. Refining the research of Nash, Selten in 1965 proposed theories that distinguished between reasonable and unreasonable decisions in predicting the outcome of games. He taught at the Free University in Berlin, the University of Bielefeld, and at the University of Bonn (from 1984).