A Beautiful Math
Subtitle: John Nash, Game Theory, And the Modern Quest for a Code of Nature
Publisher: Joseph Henry Press
Published: October 20, 2006
Place of publication: Washington, D.C., USA
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 264
ISBN-13: 9780309101929
Subjects: Popular science; Science/Mathematics; Mathematics; History & Philosophy; Mathematics / General; Game Theory
First sentence: Shortly after 9/11, a Russian scientist named Dmitri Gusev proposed an explanation for the origin of the name Al Qaeda.
Description: 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.
Table of contents: title: Introduction
pagenum: 1; label: 1
title: Smith's Hand - Searching for the Code of Nature
pagenum: 11; label: 2
title: Von Meumann's Games - Game theory's origins
pagenum: 27; label: 3
title: Nash's Equilibrium - Game theory's foundation
pagenum: 51; label: 4
title: Smith's Strategies - Evolution, altruism, and cooperation
pagenum: 73; label: 5
title: Freud's Dream - Games and the brain
pagenum: 93; label: 6
title: Seldon's Solution - Game theory, culture, and human nature
pagenum: 110; label: 7
title: Quetelet's Statistics and Maxwell's Molecules - Statistics and society, statistics and physics
pagenum: 126; label: 8
title: Bacon's Links - Networks, society, and games
pagenum: 144; label: 9
title: Asimov's Vision - Psychohistory, or sociophysics?
pagenum: 164; label: 10
title: Meyer's Penny - Quantum fun and games
pagenum: 182; label: 11
title: Pascal's Wager - Games, probability, information, and ignorance
pagenum: 197; title: Epilogue
pagenum: 217; title: Appendix: Calculating a Nash Equilibrium
pagenum: 225; title: Notes
pagenum: 233; title: Index
pagenum: 249