Nash, Jr) John US mathematician. Nash's work on game theory,
published in a number of papers in the early 1950s, attracted
little attention at the time. By the 1970s, however, as game
theory moved to the centre of theoretical economics, Nash became
almost overnight one of the best-known names in modern
economics. He shared the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1994 with
Hungarian-born US economist John Harsanyi and German economist
Reinhard Selten, for seminal contributions to game theory. John
von Neumann and Oskar Morganstern founded modern game theory in
their classic book, Theory of Games and Economic Behavior
(1944). But their analysis, ground-breaking as it was, was
confined to two-person zero-sum games (where gains equalled
losses as in a game of poker between two players). It was Nash
in his 1950 PhD dissertation who first generalized the two-
person zero-sum game to allow for multiple players and for non-
zero arbitrary-sum games. He found an equilibrium point for such
a game, which has ever since been call