A beautiful math : John Nash, game theory, and the modern quest for a code of nature / Tom Siegfried.

A beautiful math : John Nash, game theory, and the modern quest for a code of nature / Tom Siegfried.

0309101921
9780309101929

Washington, D.C. : Joseph Henry Press, [2006]

©2006

English

viii, 264 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

QA269 .S574 2006

519.3

John Nash won the 1994 Nobel Prize in economics for research published in the 1950s on a new branch of mathematics known as game theory. At the time of Nash's early work, game theory was briefly popular among mathematicians and Cold War analysts, but it remained obscure until the 1970s when evolutionary biologists began applying it to their work. In the 1980s economists began to embrace it. Since then it has found an ever-expanding repertoire of applications among a wide range of scientific disciplines. Today neuroscientists peer into game-player's brains, anthropologists play games with people from primitive cultures, biologists use games to explain the evolution of human language, and mathematicians exploit games to better understand social networks. A common thread connecting much of this research is the ancient quest for a science of human social behavior, in the spirit of the fictional science of psychohistory described by the late Isaac Asimov.--From publisher description.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 230-247) and index.

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