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A Beautiful Mind

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A Beautiful Mind

A Beautiful Mind is a book written by Sylvia Nasar and is A Touchstone Book published by Simon and Schuster. A Beautiful Mind won the 1998 National Book Critics Award for Biography, a contract for a movie deal, and a nomination for The Pulitzer Prize for Biography. This book is based on a man by the name of John Nash who is a brilliant mathematician and also a paranoid schizophrenic. Even though Nash struggled with paranoid schizophrenia he was still able to revolutionize a concept called game theory. This work that he did with game theory greatly improved what was already established as well as created the Nash equilibrium. Game theory is the mathematical study of strategies used to win games. It began with games like tic-tac-toe and chess since they are easy to analyze because they are known as games of complete information. Complete information is when your opponent’s positions are in clear site. Game theory then went on to analyze card games where player’s cards aren’t seen, which is known as incomplete information. In card games there are elements such as bluffing that can become a variable in the analysis. Mathematicians continued to analyze more critical games such as economics, biology, philosophy, and even which girl to go after. This is around the time that John Nash developed a principle for mutual consistency of player’s strategies which is known as the Nash equilibrium. The Nash equilibrium can be applied to a wider variety of games than the original game theory. This equilibrium proposes that all players have a perfect strategy that becomes stable and if they stray it will make all positions worse off. In the games there are two or more people competing over money, ideas, and even for just a few examples. Each person comes up with an approach based on their objectives as

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