Korean Job Discussion Forums

[On the other hand]

The mathematician portrayed by Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind.

I saw that movie. It was okay.

Other than that, don't much care about math.

Kind of funny, in a nice way, that he made it to 86 and still managed to avoid dying of natural causes. Apparently, he wasn't even at fault in the accident.

link

[CentralCali]

It could be argued that he and his wife are partially responsible since they evidently weren't wearing seat belts.

[On the other hand]

[joelove]

He was an important guy. Not sure what he did but it had far reaching effects in various fields.

[silkhighway]

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash_equilibrium

He is basically the grandfather of the field of applied mathematics called "Game Theory", that's heavily used in other fields like behavioral economics. "Nash Equilibrium" is his big idea.

I'm going to oversimplify here to describe it, but the idea of a "Nash equilibrium" is that every game has at least one situation where no one single player can change their strategy alone and improve their results. A game may have more than one of these situations. For example if every player chooses a different strategy at the same time, they might all improve.

* Technically not all games, only non-cooperative, perfect information games . Checkers, chess, prisoner's dillema, and "games" like retail outlets competing for marketshare are examples of games that fall under this category.