A Beautiful Math

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…