With the tragic deaths (in a taxi accident) of John Nash and his wife, people have been explaining Nash’s contributions 
to the general public. The single best piece I’ve seen so far isthis one by John Cassidy. However, even Cassidy’s piece doesn’t really make clear exactly how Nash’s famous equilibrium concept works. I’ll give some simple examples in the present post so that the layperson can understand just what Nash accomplished in his celebrated 27-page doctoral dissertation. (Be sure to look at his bibliography on the last page.)
to the general public. The single best piece I’ve seen so far isthis one by John Cassidy. However, even Cassidy’s piece doesn’t really make clear exactly how Nash’s famous equilibrium concept works. I’ll give some simple examples in the present post so that the layperson can understand just what Nash accomplished in his celebrated 27-page doctoral dissertation. (Be sure to look at his bibliography on the last page.)I have seen many commentators tell their readers that John Nash developed the theory of non-cooperative games, in (alleged) contrast to the work on cooperative games by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern. However, it’s a bit misleading to talk in this way. It’s certainly true that von Neumann and Morgenstern (henceforth vNM) did a lot of work on cooperative games (which involve coalitions of players where the players in a coalition can make “joint” moves). But vNM also did pioneering work on non-cooperative games–games where there are no coalitions and every player chooses his own strategy to serve his own payoff. However, vNM only studied the special case of 2-person, zero-sum games. (A zero-sum game is one in which one player’s gain is exactly counterbalanced by the other player’s loss.) This actually covers a lot of what people have in mind when they think of a “game,” including chess, checkers, and card games (if only two people are playing).
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