The essential John Nash / edited by Harold Kuhn and Sylvia Nasar.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Kuhn, Harold W. (Harold William), 1925-2014.

Nasar, Sylvia.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Nash, John F., Jr., 1928-2015.

Nash, John F.

Game theory.

Mathematics.

Genre:

Biographies.

Physical Description:

xxv, 244 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, [2002]

Summary:

When John Nash received the Nobel prize in economics in 1994, many people were surprised to learn that he was alive and well. Since then, Sylvia Nasar's celebrated biography A Beautiful Mind has revealed the man. The Essential John Nash reveals his work -- in his own words. This book presents, for the first time, the full range of Nash's diverse contributions not only to game theory, for which he received the Nobel, but to pure mathematics, in which he commands even greater acclaim among academics. Included are nine of Nash's most influential papers, most of them written over the decade beginning in 1949.

From 1959 until his astonishing remission three decades later, the man behind the concepts "Nash equilibrium" and "Nash bargaining" -- concepts that today pervade not only economics and mathematics but nuclear strategy and even owner-player talks in major league sports -- had lived in the shadow of a debilitating condition diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenia. In the introduction to this volume, Nasar tells the story of how Nash had, by the age of thirty, gone from being a wunderking at Princeton and a rising mathematical star at MIT to the depths of mental illness.

In his preface, Princeton University mathematician Harold Kuhn offers personal insights on his longtime friend and colleague; and in introductions to several of Nash's papers, he provides helpful scholarly context. Among the highlights is Nash's Princeton thesis, "Non-Cooperative Games," which brilliantly surpassed the earlier work of von Neumann and Morgenstern. In an afterword, Nash himself describes his current work; and in a separate note, he discusses a recently discovered error in one of his papers. A photo essay chronicles Nash's career from his student days in Princeton to the present. Also included are Nash's Nobel citation and Nobel autobiography.

The Essential John Nash makes it plain why one of Nash's colleagues termed his style of intellectual inquiry as "like lightning striking." It was in this style that Nash solved problems mainstream mathematicians had long deemed unsolvable. All those inspired by Nash's dazzling ideas will welcome this unprecedented opportunity to trace these ideas back to the exceptional mind they came from.

Contents:

1 Press Release

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences 1

3 The Game of Hex / John Milnor 31

4 The Bargaining Problem 37

5 Equilibrium Points in n-Person Games 49

6 Non-Cooperative Games Facsimile of Ph.D. Thesis 51

7 Non-Cooperative Games 85

8 Two-Person Cooperative Games 99

9 Parallel Control 117

10 Real Algebraic Manifolds 127

11 The Imbedding Problem for Riemannian Manifolds 151

Author's Note to "The Imbedding Problem for Riemannian Manifolds" 209

12 Continuity of Solutions of Parabolic and Elliptic Equations 211.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN:

0691095272

OCLC:

48416049