John Nash’s Tremendous Quick PhD Thesis: 26 Pages & Two Citations


When John Nash wrote “Non-Cooperative Video games,” his Ph.D. dissertation at Princeton in 1950, the textual content of his thesis (learn it on-line) was temporary. It ran solely 26 pages. And extra particularly, it was gentle on citations. Nash’s diss cited two texts: John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern’s Theory of Video games and Economic Behavior (1944), which essentially created sport theory and revolutionized the sector of economics; the other cited textual content, “Equilibrium Factors in n‑Particular person Video games,” was an article written by Nash himself. And it laid the foundation for his dissertation, another seminal work within the development of sport theory, for which Nash was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 1994.
The reward of inventing a brand new area is having a slim bibliography.
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Word: An earlier version of this put up appeared on our web site in June, 2015.
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