拉普拉斯小妖 2020-02-12 14:44:15

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Millions have seen the movie and thousands have read the book but few
have fully appreciated the mathematics invented 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
relatively obscure until the 1970s, when evolutionary biologists began
to find it useful. In the 1980s economists began to embrace game theory.
Since then game theory math 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.