A Celebration of John F. Nash Jr.

This collection celebrates the pathbreaking work in game theory and mathematics of John F. Nash Jr., winner of the 1994 Nobel Prize in Economics. Nash’s analysis of equilibria in the theory of non-cooperative games has had a major impact on modern economic theory. This book, also published as volume 81 of the Duke Mathematical Journal, includes an important, but previously unpublished paper by Nash; the proceedings of the Nobel seminar held in Stockholm on December 8, 1994 in his honor; and papers by distinguished mathematicians and economists written in response to and in honor of Nash’s pioneering contributions to those fields.

In 1950, when he was 22 years old, Nash presented his key idea—the Nash equilibrium—in the Ph.D. thesis he submitted to the Mathematics Department at Princeton University. In that paper, he defined a new concept of equilibrium and used methods from topology to prove the existence of an equilibrium point for n-person, finite, non-cooperative games, that is, for games in which the number of possible strategies are limited, no communication is allowed between the players, and n represents the number of players. The Nash equilibrium point is reached when none of the players can improve their position by changing strategies. By taking into account situations involving more than two players, specifically the general n-player game, Nash built significantly on the previous work of John Von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern.

Contributors. Abbas Bahri, Eric A. Carlen, Ennio De Giorgi, Charles Fefferman, Srihari Govidan, John C. Harsanyi, H. Hoffer, Carlos E. Kenig, S. Klainerman, Harold F. Kuhn, Michael Loss, William F. Lucas, M. Machedon, Roger B. Myerson, Raghavan Narasimhan, John F. Nash Jr., Louis Nirenberg, Jill Pipher, Zeév Rudnick, Peter Sarnak, Michael Shub, Steve Smale, Robert Wilson, K. Wysocki, E. Zehnder