Schools brief | Game theory

Prison breakthrough

The fifth of our series on seminal economic ideas looks at the Nash equilibrium

JOHN NASH arrived at Princeton University in 1948 to start his PhD with a one-sentence recommendation: “He is a mathematical genius”. He did not disappoint. Aged 19 and with just one undergraduate economics course to his name, in his first 14 months as a graduate he produced the work that would end up, in 1994, winning him a Nobel prize in economics for his contribution to game theory.

This article appeared in the Schools brief section of the print edition under the headline “Prison breakthrough”

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