Summary in haiku form
That I know game theory.
Think strategically!
Summary in one paragraph
Game theory, the study of strategic interactions between optimizing individuals, has applications as diverse as warfare and business and biology and, yes, games like poker. One application of game theory is to fair division problems such as the “I cut, you choose” solution to the cake-cutting problem, where we can see the importance of information: sometimes you want to be the cutter and sometimes you want to be the chooser.
Notes on specific pages
Links to books on cake-cutting
Links to moving knife procedure
John Nash shared the 1994 Nobel Prize (with John Harsanyi and Reinhard Selten) “for their pioneering analysis of equilibria in the theory of non-cooperative games.” His life was the topic of Sylvia Nasar’s 1998 book A Beautiful Mind, which in 2001 was made into an Academy-Award-winning film of the same name starring Russell Crowe. For a more true-to-life video, check out PBS’s A Beautiful Madness (buy it here, teacher’s guide here), which includes interviews with Nash.
