A Beautiful Math: John Nash, Game Theory, and the Modern Quest for a Code of NatureNational Academies Press, 21/09/2006 - 272 páginas Millions have seen the movie and thousands have read the book but few have fully appreciated the mathematics developed by John Nash's beautiful mind. Today Nash's beautiful math has become a universal language for research in the social sciences and has infiltrated the realms of evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and even quantum physics. John Nash won the 1994 Nobel Prize in economics for pioneering 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 some 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 game theory. Since then it has found an ever expanding repertoire of applications among a wide range of scientific disciplines. Today neuroscientists peer into game players' 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 its relevance to the ancient quest for a science of human social behavior, or a Code of Nature, in the spirit of the fictional science of psychohistory described in the famous Foundation novels by the late Isaac Asimov. In A Beautiful Math, acclaimed science writer Tom Siegfried describes how game theory links the life sciences, social sciences, and physical sciences in a way that may bring Asimov's dream closer to reality. |
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... individual human beings.7 In other words, put enough people together and the laws of human interaction will produce predictable patterns—just as the interactions and motion of molecules determine the temperature and pressure of a gas ...
... individual behavior, biology, and society. What about chemistry and physics? At first glance there doesn't seem to be any struggle for survival among the molecules engaged in chemical reactions. But in a way there is, and the ...
... individual laborers and businessmen to produce the wealth of nations. Together, Newton's and Smith's works inspired great thinkers to believe that all aspects of the world— physical and social—could be understood, and explained, by ...
... individuals from injustice, and providing for the public works and institutions that private individuals would not find profitable (like protecting New Orleans from hurricanes). Modern economists have noted that Smith's devotion to the ...
... stronger claim that the theory of natural selection is, in essence, Adam Smith's economics transferred to nature,” Gould wrote. “Individual organisms engaged in the 'struggle for existence' act as the analog of 24 A BEAUTIFUL MATH.
Índice
1 | |
11 | |
27 | |
3 Nashs EquilibriumGame theorys foundation | 51 |
4 Smiths StrategiesEvolution altruism and cooperation | 73 |
5 Freuds DreamGames and the brain | 93 |
6 Seldons SolutionGame theory culture and human nature | 110 |
7 Quetelets Statistics and Maxwells MoleculesStatistics and society statistics and physics | 126 |
9 Asimovs VisionPsychohistory or sociophysics? | 164 |
10 Meyers PennyQuantum fun and games | 182 |
11 Pascals WagerGames probability information and ignorance | 197 |
Epilogue | 217 |
AppendixCalculating a Nash Equilibrium | 225 |
Further Reading | 230 |
Notes | 233 |
Index | 249 |
Outras edições - Ver tudo
A Beautiful Math: John Nash, Game Theory, and the Modern Quest for a Code of ... Tom Siegfried Pré-visualização limitada - 2006 |
A Beautiful Math: John Nash, Game Theory, and the Modern Quest for a Code of ... Tom Siegfried Pré-visualização limitada - 2006 |