John Nash’s recommendation letter for grad school.

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25 April 2020, 08:29 AM

jon-nyc

John Nash’s recommendation letter for grad school.

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25 April 2020, 08:52 AM

ShiroKuro

I mean, that pretty much says it all doesn’t it?

I never did see A Beautiful Mind.

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25 April 2020, 10:03 AM

Piano*Dad

Nash Equilibrium

The wikipedia page actually does a very good job of laying out his contribution to game theory. The simple "Alice and Bob" example gives the flavor in the most basic way. Nash's contribution was much more complicated. He proved the existence of such an equilibrium for every finite game.

The proofs using fixed point theorems are further down the page.

These were relatively new and fresh ideas when I started graduate school in 1978. The work was only 27 year old. For comparison, the work that won Paul Krugman the Nobel Prize ... on trade with economies of scale (1979) and on economic geography (1991) is more in the rear view mirror today than Nash's work was when I was learning the stuff.