biography
| name: |
Nash, John F(orbes, Jr)
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| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1928– )
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| biography:
| Mathematician, born in Bluefield, Virginia, USA. He attended Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie-Mellon University), switching from chemical engineering to mathematics; he took both a BA and MA in mathematics (1948), then earned his PhD in mathematics at Princeton (1950). Joining the mathematics faculty of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1951), he was promoted to associate professor, but in 1959 mental illness forced him to resign. Thereafter he resided in Princeton, NJ, for much of that time as a visiting research scholar at Princeton University, but also as a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study. His doctoral thesis, ‘Nonco-operative Games’ was published in the early 1950s, and is regarded as laying the mathematical foundations for game theory. This field of analysis, which uses mathematics to predict how people will behave in all kinds of situations involving rivalries, was invented in the 1940s by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern. Since the 1950s, game theory has been applied by economists in studying strategic behaviour, specifically in the organization of industry for competitive situations. Nash shared the 1994 Nobel Prize for Economics with two other major contributors to game theory, John C Harsanyi (USA) and Reinhard Selten (Germany). |
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