You and your spouse are scheduled to meet for dinner tonight, but you can’t remember where. If you have no way to communicate, how can you end up at the same restaurant?

This is the sort of question Chris Anderson recalls economist Alvin Roth posing to his students. Anderson, an associate professor of finance in the KU School of Business, took a two-semester course sequence taught by Roth while he was pursuing his doctorate at the University of Pittsburgh in the early 1990s.

So when he read Monday that Roth had been named one of two winners of this year’s Nobel Prize in economics, he understood why.

“It was one of the high points of my doctoral program to be able to take a class from him,” Anderson said.

Anderson took two courses taught by Roth on the subject of game theory, “on a lark,” he said. Though he was quite busy with research, Roth was also a great teacher, he said.

He would often walk into the classroom and toss out a question for the class to ponder about how people or groups could overcome obstacles and cooperate to accomplish something. For example: How can two armies on either side of a valley come together to attack another force down in the valley, if neither is sure the other can receive any messages? (Short answer: They couldn’t.)

But where Roth excelled, he said, was in taking ideas from such questions, and the abstract mathematical concepts many economists leave on the blackboards, and using them to solve real-world problems and help people.

“I thought Alvin Roth was really someone who made economics come alive and made it seem like part of people’s lives,” Anderson said.

Roth, who now works at Stanford and formerly was at Harvard, was honored along with retired UCLA professor Lloyd Shapley for work on systems that can match people and institutions together to make something happen. Anderson recalled Roth pondering perhaps the most prominent example of this –a system for matching medical residents with hospitals that he helped design –in class.

His most recent project was to design a system to match willing kidney donors who are uncompatible with their loved ones with other pairs with the same problem, orchestrating effective swaps of kidneys to ensure more people receive transplants.

As for the question about finding your spouse for dinner, Anderson said he couldn’t recall if the class ever arrived at an answer.

“I’ve got three kids, so it’s not a problem that I have to worry about too often,” he said with a laugh.